Prophet
by Tavina
Summary: (n.) One who foretells future events. Unfortunately, the future is a heavy weight to carry. SI-OC
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by drowsyivy and UmbreonGurl.**

* * *

"The soul is vast and life small."

— Fernando Pessoa, "_Excerpts from Two Odes"_

* * *

This story begins with a garden and the spring sun beating down on the brim of my wide straw hat.

This story begins with a garden and a highly offensive vegetable. This story is probably not as humorous as it sounds, but that is in fact, how it all begins.

The hat's not strictly necessary per se, given that white hair doesn't retain heat nearly as much as black hair does, and somehow, the sun is not nearly so harsh as I remember it being.

But then, I don't have anything to compare it to. For all that I know, I dreamed of once having black hair and tanned skin, dreamed of the other languages I used to speak, of summer afternoons sparing with an aging man whose only words I remember are an occasional "good" and "again," of tea with tapioca pearls, dreamed of the late nights and keyboards and long drives falling asleep against a wide shoulder.

I'd traded black hair for white, a younger sister for an older brother, Cantonese for this new language and the old world for the new.

Maybe it was all a distant dream.

I frown as the wide leaves scratch at my short arms. It's warm enough to wear short sleeves, and while I haven't forgotten how irritating it is to have an arm covered in zucchini hair, I wasn't about to put on a long sleeved shirt and sweat through it while working outside either.

A bean beetle lands on my nose.

I pull it off my face and squish it between my fingers and flick it away as I continue twisting the errant zucchini. "Come on!" I grouse at it.

It...refuses to budge. "Come on!" I mutter at it darkly under my breath. "If you don't, I swear to the seven hells—"

It pops free unexpectedly, and I nearly go tumbling backwards.

Luckily, a quick application of chakra to my feet sticks me to the ground quite well. I wobble back and forth like an unstable spinning top. I glare with much misbegotten anger at the offending yellow vegetable in my hands. "You should be glad Saku-nii likes zucchini pancakes, or else." I plop it into my wicker basket with a sigh. "Or else I'd toss you into the trash, no regrets."

For one thing, I find zucchini unbearable unless baked into bread, and for another, this one has particularly offended me.

"Talking to your plants again, Tsuta-chan?" Niisan throws his arms around my shoulders from behind, hands clasped loosely together. "Silly little goose."

"Niisan!" I point at the basket on the ground. "Your zucchini nearly made me fall over in the dirt again."

He laughs, infectious and warm, into my neck. "Thank you for loving me so much," he gasps between breaths. He manages to pull himself together for just long enough to shake a disapproving finger at the vegetable basket. "Don't do that again, zucchini." When he's doing this, he looks like an exact miniature of our mom. "Or Hatake Tsutako will have you for dinner."

We stare at each other, matching grins on our faces, before bursting into helpless laughter.

I sit down in the black dirt. "I'm gonna have it for dinner anyway."

"Oops. My bad." Niisan comes to join me. "Your good behavior won't save you. We're gonna eat you for dinner just the same."

And that's a promise.

* * *

Later that evening finds me shredding the zucchini with a metal grater into a plastic tub as Niisan mixes flour and water to make pancake batter.

I call them pancakes, but really, they're much thinner and flatter than pancakes, probably more the asiatic version of savory crepes than anything else.

Still, that doesn't quite have the same ring to it, so pancake will have to do.

It's comforting to do this.

Slide slide slide, and the white flesh of the zucchini is revealed, each strip perfectly round and perfectly the same as all the others.

It probably helps that I take vindictive pleasure in seeing the zucchini disappear into shredded zucchini as well.

"Tsuta-chan," Niisan begins, "how did the graduation exam go?" There's a hesitant edge to his question, as if he's almost afraid to ask.

I don't know why this would be exactly. There'd never been any reason to think I _wouldn't _pass. I'm Hatake Tsutako, daughter of Konoha's White Wolf and a well respected and terrifying Jounin, younger sister of a genin who's so close to a chunin promotion at age eleven that he could probably smell the newness of his future flak jacket and the second youngest member of a ninja clan.

It would quite frankly, be embarrassing if I _didn't pass the Academy Graduation Exam. _

I shrug. "It went well. Why do you ask?" I'd been handed a forehead protector, now all that remains is to see if I can defend the right to wear one in front of my jounin sensei tomorrow.

"Ah." He ruffles my hair with a floury hand. "Well, Mom and Dad weren't there to congratulate you, and I was out too, so…" He trails off. "I'm sure there were other people there, weren't there?"

I think back to when I'd stepped out of the Academy doors that mid afternoon. "There were more people there than normal…" I shrug again and go back to shredding my zucchini. "But I don't like people, Niisan."

I can't tell him that I'd rather no one congratulate me, because that isn't true.

If Mom and Dad were there to pick me up and ask how the exam had went, I'd certainly be overjoyed.

But elite Jounin are in high demand right now, with border tensions at all time high.

As a family of patriots, as someone who wasn't in danger of failing the exams and being held back another year, I'm sure it's no big deal. When the expectation is that you'd graduate, the actual graduation isn't a surprise.

He makes an offended noise. "What am I, then, to you? Chopped liver?"

I stick my tongue out at him while I pass him the tub of shredded zucchini before climbing onto the step stool to wash the grater. "No. You're week old dog food."

He gasps a hand over his heart. "What did I do in my last life to deserve a little sister with such a sharp tongue?"

"What did I do in my last life to deserve an older brother who compares himself to liver?" _So dramatic, silly Niisan._

I'd likely died young last time. From what I remember, my little sister hadn't been much more than a teenager when she'd squeezed my hand one last time at my hospital deathbed.

But then, I don't remember it _well_.

All I know is that I don't like hospitals.

The zucchini and batter concoction safely sizzling in the flat bottomed pan, we end up sitting on the kitchen floor together, looking at the table — covered in zucchini skin — and the counter — covered in a mix of flour and batter — and the floor — covered in some mixture of all four items.

Almost at the exact same moment, we groan, hands over our eyes.

"Time to clean up?" I ask him.

"Time to clean up," he agrees, climbing slowly to his feet to grab a broom while I reach into the cabinet under the sink to grab a dust pan.

* * *

That night I practice my kata in the dojo against the wooden training dummy, running through all the barehand techniques I remember, one form bleeding into the next, and the next, and the next as I switch from the basic Academy style, to the beginner Hatake Style, to the intermediate style Dad had just taught me, to the bastard style Mom taught me, to what I remember from my past life.

The muscle memory isn't there, for these aren't the same muscles. It's more like an itch. I know it's there, but I can't quite get the motions right. I'd spent too many years on it to forget it so easily, spent years practicing barehanded, being told to get up when I was knocked down — _again_ — before even being allowed to touch a pole much less a sword, that I couldn't just forget it all.

I'd done so much, worked so _hard _for the right to pick up a sword for the first time.

In the beginning, it had frustrated me. I'd been trying to fight before I learned how to master my control of this child's body. I hadn't the muscles, hadn't the reflexes, and it had been a bitter feeling to start all the way at the bottom again. I didn't want to start at the bottom and work my way back up.

But the backslide was inevitable.

_Again. _I hear the trace of the Cantonese accent lingering, the rhythm not quite right. _Again. _

And I'd already spent one childhood being knocked down.

I got back up.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And somewhere between climbing to my feet, muscles aching, one time and the next, I grew into this child's body.

I grew into the chakra pumping through each muscle like blood.

I grew into a new name, a new group of people, a new world.

I grew like my namesake, ivy winding up any available surface, always towards the sun.

Katas finished, I pick up a practice tanto from the rack by the door of the dojo and take to the empty floor space.

Not old enough yet for a full katana or even a wakizashi and definitely not skilled enough for a sharpened tanto without Mom or Dad here to spot me, I make do with the blunted practice blade.

It doesn't have the same heft or cut through the air the same way, but I'm in love with the thrill of it all the same.

It's the same mental space, the same footwork, the same way the world blurs all around, until it's only me and the blade.

_I'm sure there were other people there, weren't there? _

I falter.

I brush away the sweat stinging at my eyes, before setting the tanto back onto the rack.

It's sweet how my brother worries.

It's sweet how he's always fighting against our conflicting schedules, fighting to come home whenever our parents are called away like they are tonight even though I am self-sufficient enough to see to myself. If I were truly seven years old, maybe this would be harder, but though I have to stand on a stool to reach the sink, I am far from lost.

I'm almost afraid that I'm holding him back.

And if I'm holding him back from his full potential, how do I square that circle?

I am someone who was never meant to be given life, someone whose name was never meant to be. _Hatake Tsutako. _

On my way to bed from the dojo, I pause by his door. "Niisan? Can I ask you something?"

He pushes whatever he was reading intently away and swings around to offer me a smile. "Of course, goose. Ask me anything you want."

"Doesn't your sensei get upset with you when you keep asking to come home?"

He freezes, a...something on his face that wasn't there before.

Outside, a moth pounds its wings on the window glass, as though begging to come inside and get fried to a crisp on the electric light.

"No, not at all. Why do you ask?"

_Lying Niisan. _I frown at him. "You're not fooling anyone."

"Such a sharp pair of gardening shears you are," he singsongs back at me.

I whack his shoulder lightly. "I am _not_ a pair of gardening shears."

But for the moment, he's succeeded in distracting me.

* * *

Sensei surveys us all with his hands on his hips. He likely recognizes that most of us will either fail the next portion of the graduation exam or else be dead within the year.

The statistics don't lie. They're there for anyone to look at.

And I come from a position of self awareness.

I hadn't chosen this career path with my eyes blinded by pride, after all. No, Mom and Dad had sat me down like they'd sat down with Niisan four years before, and explained in detail what the shinobi life would entail.

_Death. Murder. Deceit. War. Seduction._

It isn't a profession for the faint of heart. It isn't a profession for the honorable soul.

I have neither.

If it was just the physical thrill of the katas I loved, I didn't have to choose this route. I'm sure they would've taught me anyway, humored me with all sorts of esoteric forms of martial arts, some impractical but exhilarating and very pretty skills.

I could have spent another life as a casual martial artist, a weekend enthusiast passing through the forms without the intent to kill, with only a ceremonially sharpened sword, a performer for cultural celebrations, children's birthday parties, talent shows.

But the weight of memory toppled the scales. What I want and what I need to survive doesn't allow for a casual future, for safety and happiness placed in the hands of others — they'd drop it; they'd drop it every time. I don't have the time, patience, or heart to let anyone drop my future when they weren't paying attention.

My brother is Hatake _Sakumo _for god's sake.

This isn't some game. I could trace the rise and fall, the story beats that reduced my brilliant brother to merely a footnote of some cosmic tragedy which gripped my nephew's life.

And I could tear it apart with my bare hands.

The god of this world is some man sitting in his office making up our lives so he could sell the story for money. What an unfortunate god to have.

"Team Four: Dan Kato, Hatake Tsutako, Yuuhei Shinku." Sensei pauses, takes a deep breath and continues. "Lead by Elder Utatane Koharu."

This won't be an easy test then.

I can imagine Elder Utatane sparing the time for a genin team as a favor to Mom, who worked with her closely several years back, considering they still keep in touch, but I can't imagine this would be _easy._

The Sandaime himself had taken a team last year.

This generation's Team Seven, the future Sannin. Their legend was already growing even though, at the moment, they're just rookie genin.

Any team with the Shodai's granddaughter would have that effect.

As a team, we follow Elder Utatane out, the boys whispering together without me.

This doesn't bother me much.

Like I told Saku-nii, I don't really...like people. Not people my age, not too many people who aren't my age either.

And the fact that I clearly didn't care to spend any extra time with my classmates, in turn, led them to for the most part, leave me to my own devices. Which suits me just fine.

I much prefer the quiet of my garden, where the effort I put in shows visible signs of reciprocation.

Unexpectedly, we enter the Tower and follow her up two flights of stairs to her office.

She takes a seat and gestures for us to do the same.

She's prepared seating and time and space for us already. Well, it's not as if I didn't know that.

Utatane Koharu isn't someone who does anything by halves after all.

"Since we're here," she folds her hands together before her, "let's introduce ourselves, shall we? I am Utatane Koharu. I will be your jounin-sensei. If you want to know any other information about me, that will be up to you to discover."

_So, not someone who's going to waste time on frivolities. _

I mirror her posture and wait for someone else to begin. From what I've learned of my sensei so far, she's meticulous, practical, thinks ahead, not frivolous…

A kunoichi. Someone who appreciates my mom's special brand of cutthroat crazy.

I don't expect her to use the bell test, given that the Sandaime had used that test just the year before, but I don't expect no test either.

In the stretching silence, one of my teammates finally decides to speak up. "Um, I'm Kato Dan...I was assigned to Team Four this morning...I have a little sister…" Finally, his uncertainty at what sorts of information he's supposed to share trails off into silence.

Well, he didn't last long.

"Yuuhi Shinku." My other teammate grouses. He crosses his arms and slumps further down into his seat.

I sit in silence, my right leg crossed over my left, my hands folded over my knee, perfectly assured.

"Well?" Utatane-sensei asks. "Aren't you going to introduce yourself?"

"We all know each other's names. And beyond that…" I glance once to the right — there's Dan. I glance once to the left — there's Shinku. "For example, I know that Shinku fell asleep during the chakra theory exam last week, and that Dan goes to pick his younger sister up from her classroom door every day after the Academy lets out."

I mean, I've been in a class with both of them for two years already. "And we weren't doing proper introductions anyway."

I expect her to know _everything _about me, because her desk speaks of someone who never procrastinates. There's barely anything on it.

You don't get to be a council elder by your mid twenties unless you have the work ethic to back it up. The position isn't like Hokage, which the Nidaime passed on in the space of two sentences in a warzone.

No, only grit opens the door to that position.

Thus, she's already read our files, knows our names, ages, birthdates, heights, weights, skills, family members, friends...anything else the academy chunin sensei's felt like putting in the file. Major personality quirks would be in there too.

She'd expect this of me, probably. Maybe she'd also know how much I hate zucchini.

The boys look at each other, look back at me. "How did you know that?"

It would be hard to _not _know a thing about them unless I really was a block of stone. I barely blink, voice perfectly flat. "I have eyes."

They...don't have much to say to this.

And thus ends our...team introduction.

Utatane-sensei claps her hands together. "Well, now that we're introduced, it's time to proceed onto your real test."

"Our real test?" Dan asks. Good God. His voice actually quavers.

I continue staring straight ahead.

"You may have passed the Academy Graduation Exam, but since I'll be investing my time into your education, I might as well see if it's worthwhile for _me._" Utatane-Sensei's smile borders on slightly sadistic. "Which means that I get to test you."

* * *

We reconvene outside the Tower.

We might not be friends, them and I, and they're only banding together right now because they can't really see making small talk with _me, _but none of us want to fail and get booted either back to the Academy or worse, the Genin Corps, so we form a huddle around the scroll Utatane-sensei had slide across the table.

_Fetch me this. _She'd said. _And if you can bring it here by sundown you pass._

"Let's see what this is, shall we?" I have no idea what it is, how far away it is, how hard it would be to fetch "this" but I do know that if it has a scent, I could summon Kyogi to try and track it for us.

He's getting on in years, having been a puppy Dad picked out at the Inuzuka Kennels back a month before I was born, and he likes to spend most of the time lazing around and napping in his patch of sun, but he'd still help if I called for him.

"Yeah, let's get this show on the road." Shinku shoves his hands in his pockets and waits for me to pull apart the ribbon.

"But what if we can't find it?" I get the feeling that Dan will continue to wear on my patience.

And my patience wasn't particularly expansive to begin with.

"Then we go back to the Academy. Or to the Genin Corps." Those are the two alternatives. I won't settle for either.

Genin Corps is synonymous with wartime fodder.

To go where I want to go, and to do what I want to do, I couldn't accept that.

I _wouldn't _accept that.

"Well, let's get on with it then." Shinku stands there, his hands balled to fists in his pockets and scowls mightily. "Or we'll never be able to pass."

It's noon already. The sun beats down on us, hot and heavy.

I unfurl the scroll.

It's blank.

I resist the urge to curse.

* * *

**A.N. **So this idea took hold a _very_ long time ago, but only recently did I actually organize this into an actual first chapter. I'm quite proud of how this turned out.

As always, let me know what you think! I love hearing your thoughts.

~Tavina


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Drowsyivy, Fishebake, UmbreonGurl, and aflowerydeath**

* * *

"You have such a February face, so full of frost, of storm and cloudiness."

— William Shakespeare, _Much Ado About Nothing_

* * *

"Is it…" Dan scuffs the bottom of his shinobi issued standard blue sandals against the dusty path we were standing on. "Is it possible that Sensei gave us the wrong scroll?"

"I doubt it," I cut in before Shinku can say something else.

There's really no need to give Dan a nervous breakdown before everything goes to Hell in a handbasket. He might be nervous and neurotic and probably just a bit too soft for the war that's about to come, but that doesn't mean I have to terrorize him the first day we're working together. The thought helps to temper my tongue.

I don't have to terrorize him because we are supposed to be working together. Our fates are entwined for as long as we are on the same team.

Back to the problem at hand.

This scroll might be blank, but Sensei isn't. She wants us to fetch something, even if we don't really know what it is.

There are infinite possibilities, and we have to find her the right one.

It's like searching for a single life amongst the infinite cosmos, one dim star amongst trillions.

Which is...hopeful of me, I guess.

I turn the scroll sideways. There is...still, obviously, nothing on it. I hold it up, letting the sunlight fall through it. Still nothing.

At this point, I'm tempted to heat test it to make sure there's nothing on this god forsaken piece of paper. It would be something Mom would be fond of doing, but hers would involve seven layers of chemical analysis.

But we don't have time for any extensive chemical tests, so Sensei likely didn't leave us some sort of cryptic message. No, the message is the scroll.

But the scroll is blank.

How can we fetch her nothing?

Thus round and round goes the dilemma.

"But then what do we do?" It seems like he's anxious without even trying.

Good God. I wasn't even trying.

"Well, first we don't go out of our minds because that will help nothing." We could reserve a moment for a Team Panic Session _after _we dig ourselves out of this test.

"But if we fail…" Shinku trails off. "If we fail then we're going to the Genin Corps."

He's ninja born as well, shinobi raised. The Yuuhi are a prominent Konoha ninja family, if not a particularly large one. Genjutsu specialization runs in the family, but as Konoha is home of the _Uchiha _the Yuuhi had been largely underutilized and overlooked by comparison.

Which is unfortunate, because I can say that while the Uchiha are talented, I much prefer Shinku over any of my Uchiha classmates when it comes to being on the same team.

He at least doesn't have a stick so far up his ass that it impedes his ability to talk. He knows how heavy the border tensions weigh right now. He's well aware of the political landscape.

I survey the two boys, all of us scrawny, lean as only ninja children are. "I don't think we're going to fail."

This is only a guess, a wild hunch based on what I know, and what I can piece together.

The three of us make up the best balanced team of the entire graduating class.

No, we weren't this year's Rookie, Top Kunoichi, and Dead Last. Two lifetimes and I still hate trigonometry with a burning passion.

One's ability to _throw _a kunai that hits a target perfectly every time, alas, does not translate into the ability to calculate the _arc of that kunai_ as it launches from my fingertips based only on muscle memory.

I still hate math, but I hit a perfect bull's eye ninety nine times out of a hundred, and I can safely say that both of the boys before me can at _least_ match, if not exceed it.

But we _are _a valuable team. We're all shinobi children, even if none of us come from a big clan. We're balanced. Each of us means something.

Maybe it's just my wishful thinking, but I don't believe that we are a team Utatane Koharu has taken on just to fail.

"How can you possibly know that?" Dan wrings his hands, a quaver in his voice.

I remind myself that he is seven years old and this is likely the first time someone's seemingly rejected him like this before.

"Think about it." I roll the scroll back up. "We're the first team Elder Utatane has ever bothered to take." _And we might be the first team Utatane Koharu has to fail. _"So clearly, she gave us a blank scroll on purpose. The test isn't to find whatever object she wants us to 'find.' The test is to see if we know what she _wants us to find._"

Dan sits down on the ground, in the dusty street, and folds his hands together tightly. He squares his shoulders, raises his chin. There's a backbone in all of us, I guess, even those of us that start out more nervous than others.

"So we just have to find that thing." He closes his eyes and breathes out. "Let's go ask the archives what they know about Elder Utatane that we didn't learn in a history book."

"That plan isn't half bad." Shinku pats him on the back. "We'll get somewhere."

I breath out. No, this isn't an overinflation of my own ego.

We aren't going to fail.

There is an answer to the riddle and we're going to find it.

* * *

Half an hour into searching the Archives, we'd found our new sensei's mission records and not much else about her.

Given that we're fresh genin who haven't even passed our Jounin-sensei's test, well, it's to be expected. We don't have the clearance for anything important.

"What do you think she'd want?" Shinku grouses as he slams down another stack of paper on the table we'd been organizing our information on.

All he manages with this is to send up a cloud of dust that gets into all of our lungs.

Dan chokes on a cough, and I wave a hand in front of my face. "Do you mind?" I ask him.

Maybe we have to work together because all of our fates are tied to the same scroll that could either doom us or set us free, but that doesn't mean that I have to put up with other people throwing up dust in my face.

"Yar yar yar," Shinku coughs and flaps a hand at me. "Quit trying to bite me, Hatake. We need to solve this, or none of us are going to get out of this alive."

"You're forgetting that none of us are leaving this life alive, Yuuhi." I refuse to accept that we're all born to die, because songs aren't sung just for the purpose of ending them. Doesn't erase the fact that we're all going to die.

A character might survive until the end of a show, if the cruel god writing is indifferent enough, but as people?

We're all going to die.

"Aren't you a ray of sunshine," Shinku frowns at me. "I want to live until old age, alright?"

"You're not the only one." I'd died at age twenty, hadn't accomplished much of anything the last time around. I'd lingered in the space between adult and child, and hadn't managed to fully define myself as one or the other. Too independent to be a child, not grown up enough to be an adult. "Don't make assumptions, Yuuhi."

I'd voted in one election, bought my own groceries, never learned to drive.

Is it so bad that I want to live long enough to grow old? To grow properly into a life at least decently well lived?

"Ah," Dan looks between us, a frown on his face. "No one should assume anything. We all share the same goals, so let's not take our stress out on each other, alright?"

Both Shinku and I stare at him — he's quaking, but he's offering the both of us a shaky smile — before we drop the argument.

It doesn't lessen the tension between us, but we put our heads down and keep reading.

And reading.

And reading.

There's something about this that I'm forgetting.

"Can I see the scroll again?"

Dan tosses it to me over a pile of papers that he's looking through. "I still haven't found anything that might give us a clue, but apparently, Sensei was in the Land of Wind not a month ago."

The scroll is still blank, as it was when this whole thing began.

"What if…" I say, slowly chewing through all the options we have open to us. "We put something on this blank scroll, and bring that instead."

That's one way to answer this riddle.

She'd said "fetch me this."

Thus, we bring her whatever we put on the scroll, and we pass the test.

"Would it really be that simple?" Shinku looks up from where he'd been browsing tax records.

At the very least, it's a mildly intelligent parlor trick. "We have until sunset to fetch her something, don't we?"

The sun's sinking on the horizon even now, golden light spilling all over the musty shelves and papers in the stacks.

We look at each other in a panic, and do the first thing that comes to mind when a fresh Academy student does when confronted with a blank sheet of paper.

Three names end up on the scroll, and we abandon the Archives forthwith.

When in doubt, bring yourself and your team members.

* * *

Sensei actually cracks a smile when she unfurls the scroll and sees three haphazard names scrawled on it in our haste to make it back to her tower office in time.

"So tell me, why this choice?"

We look at each other once. To be perfectly honest…

"We brought ourselves because that's what makes up a team."

It's… _Dan. _He seems to have recovered his footing well enough. "The test was about proving if we were committed to being shinobi, wasn't it?" He scuffs the bottom of his sandal against the wooden floorboards as he continues. "And there's no team without the sum of its parts."

He's surprisingly eloquent now, more so than he'd been earlier today or that I've noticed in class.

But the most surprising thing is that he genuinely _believes _in what he's saying. _There's no team without the sum of its parts. _

_But sometimes, a team isn't what you wanted. _

I don't know what exactly it is that I _do _want, but I am uncomfortable here, out of sync and out of place.

"Very pretty." Koharu-sensei hums. "But let's see what your teammates have to say, shall we?"

Shinku speaks up next. "Every member of a team pulls their own weight."

Koharu-sensei considers it for a mere second, and then she's moved on.

"And you, Tsutako? Why is your name on this scroll?"

I owe her some form of truth at least, I guess. If she is to be my sensei, even if she hasn't said that we passed yet, she deserves at least part of the truth. "If I didn't write my name on the scroll, none of us would pass." _And I can't afford to fail. _

Every day, every hour, every moment, the future bears down on me, like I'm on a runaway train hurtling straight for the side of a stone cliff. If the lever isn't pulled in time to divert the path, I and all the passengers on this wild ride are going to end up splattered on the side of a mountain.

I can't afford to fail. I don't have the time to try this again.

Koharu-sensei lingers over this answer a moment longer than the other ones.

I almost imagine her weighing my words on a scale, though I don't know which way the fulcrum tips until I see one corner of her mouth tilt up.

"A truthful answer." She rolls the scroll back up with one flick of her wrist. "Meet me here tomorrow at 6:30 am. Your physical training will begin then."

* * *

I walk back through the older parts of the city on my way home. I don't have my basket, but if Saku-nii is going to be home for the next few days, I'll have to stop by the butcher's.

He's hitting a growth spurt again on top of the grueling mission schedule his sensei had been keeping his team on to make sure they qualify for the next Chunin Exams, so he needs to replenish his energy when he's at home.

I'm not sure about me yet, but I imagine my new training will be tougher than before. Thus, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to buy an extra pound of pork on top of the two chickens I buy nearly every week.

Niisan has a fondness for chicken soup.

The bell fixed to the door of the shop jingles when I cross the threshold, not that it helps notify the people inside more easily.

Kobayashi Yuuto is deaf in one ear from an accident that no one has ever fully explained to me, and he doesn't generally respond to the door unless I announce myself when I arrive.

"Kobayashi-san!" I call into the back of the shop.

He's normally in the front in the afternoons, weighing up meat, wiping the counter, or slowly sharpening some knife or other from his stash.

Sometimes he'll sharpen my kunai too, for a discount price compared to the weapons dealer down the street, and just about the same quality.

He'd only be in the back if there's an animal he needs to take cuts from, and that happens in the mornings, rarely in the afternoons.

"If it isn't Hatake-chan." He beams when he sees me, wiping his bloody hands on his apron smock before leaning over the counter to look at me, a dark shock of hair falling over his forehead. "I drained thirty chickens this morning, and I saved the biggest two for you."

"I need a pound of pork too." I prop my face up on his counter so that we are eye to eye. "Preferably leaner because I want to make dumplings."

"Your brother's back home then?" He unhooks the two chickens hanging in the freezer.

"Uh-huh." I wait for him to bag them, peering at the cuts of meat he's laid out from behind the glass of his cold case. "Saku-nii got home last night." There, that looks like a cut of about a pound. "Can I get that one, please?"

He nods at me and finishes bagging the chickens.

"This going on the family tab?" He asks as he weighs up the pork.

Once a month, Dad's bank account pays off the tab at any places Saku-nii and I might've racked up for food, weaponry, and other odds and ends.

That's the family tab.

I don't generally run it up with anything frivolous.

Two lives, and even if money is not hard to come by in this life, I know its value. I know how my parents and elder brother earn it.

It's literally bought in by blood.

"Yeah, put it on the family tab please." It's a pound and a quarter. The chickens are a normal purchase, the pork is extra.

He wraps the meat for me in wax paper and bags it in a separate bag from the chickens.

"Have a good night, Hatake-chan," he calls after me when I nod to him and head out.

* * *

In the outer foyer of the house, I can sense the difference the moment my foot crosses the threshold.

There's a felt hat hanging on the hat peg by the door, a tan canvas cloak hanging from a peg, a pair of black boots muddied a bit from the road propped up by the door.

"Dad!" I call as I drop my purchases and slip off my own sandals.

Halfway down the hall, my measured walk blurs into a run. I see him stepping out of the master bedroom at the other end, sleeves rolled up, his hair down and his arms spread wide.

"Dad!"

I slam into him with enough force that in another life, it would knock him back against the wall.

He doesn't even budge in this one.

Hatake Hayashi is famous for many reasons, but I don't care about the White Wolf as much as I care that he is _Dad, _and he is _home. _He is home so rarely now that I can walk and talk and be reasonably expected to take care of myself.

"Goose!" He swings me around once, twice, a third time for good measure before setting me down. "You've grown so tall!"

I frown at him. "You've only been gone for two months."

He laughs. "You've grown taller since I was home last." He pulls back, takes a good look at me, and brushes the bangs from my face. "Congratulations." It's a simple acknowledgement, and it's all that I need.

He might not have been home for when I got it, or been there to tell me that he believed I would pass Koharu-sensei's test, but he's here now.

"Daaad." I rearrange my hair so that it sits as it normally does. "I haven't grown taller at all. You're making that up."

Only now do I remember the meat I dropped in the foyer.

I pull Dad back down the hallway by his hand, chattering all the while. "Are you hungry? I was just about to make dumplings!"

* * *

**A.N. **In which we are introduced to more of Tsutako's people. The general stage setting should wrap up next chapter and then we...kind of just hit the plot.

Thank you so much everyone for a wonderful response to chapter one of this fic. It means the world to me.

~Tavina


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by UmbreonGurl, drowsyivy, and aflowerydeath.**

* * *

"Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it's the place we find the deepest heartache."

— Iyanla Vanzant

* * *

Dad ends up joining Saku-nii and me in our adventure to make dumplings. He stands there in the kitchen, chopping up the pound and a quarter of pork I bought earlier as I knead dough, and Saku-nii fires up the stove and hefts two pots of water onto it.

"So Goose made genin!" Dad is in a jovial mood, showing off his knife skills as he flips one into the air and catches it loosely by the handle. "What's Finch been up to?"

"We took another out of village mission." Saku-nii frowns. "It was...slightly derailed." He turns to Dad, who is casually whistling as he continues chopping meat. "Were you in Grass by any chance?"

Dad laughs. "Why would I have been in Grass?" That doesn't confirm or deny either way, but I'm going to bet my left kunai pouch that Dad was in Grass and Saku-nii's guessed it.

"You know you shouldn't ask him, Nii-san." I frown as I continue kneading dough. "It's above our clearance level."

Many things are above our clearance level.

Where Dad had been for the past two months? Above my clearance level.

What Mom does in her lab? Above my clearance level.

Saku-nii's last mission? Still above my clearance level.

"So? I can still ask and hope he slips up." Saku-nii shrugs.

It bothers him less I suppose.

Official information is closely guarded, and even if I'd like to know what Dad was doing in Grass, or wherever else he'd gone in these two months, he wouldn't be able to tell me, and I shouldn't ask.

"It's Dad." I cast him a look. "He's not going to slip up. Dad doesn't _do _slipping up."

In my previous life, I'd come from a family with so few secrets between us. If I'd wanted to know something, I need only to _ask, _and it would be explained as best as others were able.

I'd known so much, family stories bandied about the kitchen table. I'd known where I came from, where my parents came from, how they'd met, so many little details about their pasts.

The flour feels the same between my fingers — it sticks the same way in this life as it did in the last — but I don't really know so much about Dad.

I know that he is Hatake Hayashi, Konoha's White Wolf, a swordsman, that he likes his dumplings with vinegar just as I like mine, but the rest?

The rest I'd have to trust him on, because he's not at liberty to tell me.

Whatever family secrets are boarded up beneath the floor, whatever corpses have rotted between the walls, whatever there is in the basement or in the attic?

I'd have to take a blind leap of faith for that.

"Now now, Goose." Dad tugs on a lock of my hair. "There's no need to hiss. Wherever I've been, I'm at home now, neh?"

I turn my head away, frowning. He will be called away again eventually.

Konoha needs him and will always need him as long as he is willing to give, and he is a man who does not refuse the giving.

I _ought _to appreciate that he's home with enough energy to spend time with us like this. I ought to be happy about it.

But somehow, somehow I still teeter back and forth between conflict.

From the hallway, there's the sound of footsteps. Mom turns the corner into the kitchen, staring straight ahead. Mechanically, she measures out the instant coffee and puts a cup of water into the microwave.

"Welcome home," Dad leans forward to kiss her cheek, but she turns her face to look more directly at the countdown on the microwave, and he just kind of… misses. "Darling."

"I suppose you find yourself very clever." She still doesn't turn to look at him, or us really.

Saku-nii and I have faded into the background now, our earlier disagreements forgotten.

"I don't understand." Dad leans back against the table, hands at his sides. "You'll have to be more clear, I'm afraid, Darling. I just got home, so I doubt I'm up to speed."

"You know _exactly_ what you've done." From the profile view, I see Mom clench her jaw. For one brief moment, she turns to look at us. "Tsutako, Sakumo, clean up and go to the dojo. Your father will be along _shortly._"

Very quietly, we do so.

"We were having a good time before you came home." I hear Dad say, before the door closes behind us, and their terse conversation muffles into sounds too indistinct to hear properly.

Saku-nii tugs at my sleeve.

Still I pause.

He tugs more insistently. "_Goose._" He drags me down the hallway, down towards the dojo. "You know better than this," he reprimands me after we close the door behind us.

"They never get along." I huff, collapsing to sit on the floor.

A limp strand of white hair rises, carried by my breath before tumbling back down again.

"Why are they still married if they don't get along?"

I rarely see them happy with each other. Dad is too lackadaisical and rarely stays at home. Mom is too driven by her work in the labs and often sleeps there instead, especially if she knows Dad's going to be home beforehand. It's actually rather unusual for her to come home that evening if Dad just got home that same afternoon.

For all intents and purposes, they don't live together already.

"_Tsutako_." When I look up, Saku-nii is staring at me with horrified eyes. "What else would they be if they aren't married?"

"Amicably separated." The society in Konoha is just — still rather traditional.

One has few options in regards to one's married life choices: single, married, widowed.

And my parents are very much married.

"I don't think that's possible." Saku-nii comes to sit next to me, and as casually as a pre-teen boy is able, pulls me into his arms for a hug. "I didn't mean to say you were wrong earlier," he says. "I know Dad will never say if he was there or not, even if I _saw_."

_Did you see? _I don't know what would be going on in Grass that would need Dad there either. "And I didn't really mean to get snippy with you." I don't like hugs, but I can spare a hug for him. I grab him around the middle and squeeze as tightly as I am able.

"Oh, I know." He squeezes me back, once tightly. "I know."

* * *

Dad comes down the hall a little while later, stands outside the door for a moment. We hear him whistle for Kyogi. There's silence for a moment, but no further response.

Then, he slides the door open. "Well, we've been relieved from dumpling duty." He's still trying to spin it kindly, spin it in a way that doesn't make anyone into a villain, doesn't make our familial relationships cracked around the edges. It either makes him — or us — naive, but we pretend it's so anyway. "Mom says she's going to cook tonight."

Well, it'll taste good then.

Mom is a wonderful cook.

I just wish it wasn't her way of apologizing or antagonizing, turning food into a weapon in a way dinner time isn't supposed to be.

"Well then," Saku-nii pushes himself up off the floor. "I have a mission report to write."

Dad steps aside to let him through, but there's a downturn to his lips. Something about the terse way Saku-nii had reacted..._bothered _him.

If I were a more sociable child, I'd have said something to lighten the mood, cracked some joke that would have us both in stitches, picking ourselves up off the floor with laughter.

A life ago, perhaps, I would've.

In this moment, I say nothing at all.

The burden's on him to break the silence. It always is.

"I'm sorry, Goose." For a moment, he's exceptionally serious.

"What for?" It's not like he can change this exactly. I suppose, if I really want to admit to myself, he could take a different route. But I don't know what binds him and Mom together, having no idea how they met or married to begin with.

"I missed your graduation." His seriousness passes like a summer storm, there and then suddenly gone. "Do you want to know a secret?" The smile he shares with me is more conspiratory than normal. He doesn't wait for me to nod or shake my head. Yes has already been determined. "I got you a present."

"A present?" I am not a child to be distracted by presents...but at the same time I am.

I've never been out of Konoha's gates, and while I'm allowed free reign to wander about the city, that really doesn't mean I've been anywhere important.

So whatever present Dad's so excited to show me, it's from somewhere outside the gates. He hasn't been back long enough to pick up a present for me.

What had he picked up on his travels that would warrant his excitement? I crane my neck, trying to see if he's holding something in his hands that he's kept clasped behind his back.

He laughs, holding up his empty hands. "I'm not giving you some trinket from another country, Goose."

Instead, he strides across the room to the metal chest that's been locked for as long as I can remember. He turns back to me, with the smile of a boy. "Well, come over. Your graduation present is in here."

I am curious, despite myself. "What is it?"

"A surprise." He fishes a key out of his pocket and opens the chest with a metallic creak. "I had it commissioned in the Land of Iron about eight and a half years ago." He sighs, but it's a soft, content thing. "And I've been waiting ever since."

The object he pulls from the chest is wrapped in a red cloth, but instantly recognizable.

It's a hand and a half sword, the hilt peeking out from behind the red.

He turns the hilt towards me. "It's yours now, Tsuta-chan."

My own blade.

I reach out for it with a hand, grasped the hilt tightly, and unsheathe it. The sound of metal singing against wood is a sound familiar from another life.

It's a bit long for my child arms, a fair bit heavier than what I'm used to, but I turn with it anyway, swinging out with it, gray metal gleaming under the electric lights. Its momentum is faster than what I'm used to, a soft _woosh _as it cuts through the air.

It is so well made, so well sharpened, so balanced.

A shinobi-forged blade for a shinobi.

"Dad…" I look up at him through a film of tears. "_Thank you_."

He laughs, suddenly awkward, boyish in his delight over a gratitude that he does not feel that he has earned. "I had a feeling you'd like it." He tugs a lock of my hair. "My sword wielding goose girl."

He strides to the center of the floor, unsheathes his own blade, and beckons for me to join him.

And I forgive him.

* * *

Mom's already gone by the time I rise the next morning to water my garden, just a note pinned to the refrigerator as any indication she'd been there at all. I pull it off and read the words tersely written in her tiny, cramped handwriting."At Lab 17. Leftovers on bottom shelf. Back tomorrow."

It's no more particularly out of the ordinary than say, the neatly stacked dishes on the dry rack that always appears more clean somehow after Mom's been home. I pin the note back onto the refrigerator with a magnet for everyone else.

A glance to the left is all I need to locate the pad of sticky notes and the cup of pens. I add a note of my own.

"Gone to water garden. Missions. Back later tonight."

Utatane-sensei wants to see us at training ground twenty-seven at 6:30 am. I do not know when I'll be back.

The plants need care.

I pass Dad asleep on the couch, loosely holding one corner of the blanket he'd bothered to take with him, the rest of it pooling on the floor.

He's going to have a crick in his neck.

I pull the covers back over him. I can't do much about the neck pain, or probably the emotional pain he feels, but at least I can prevent him from catching a cold.

_Why do you stay? _

_Why do either of you stay? _

He must've been tired, because he only shifts in his sleep and sighs without waking up. In the quiet of his family home, he doesn't have to fear death, so at least there's that, one source of tension eased. I stare at him for a moment longer while trying to resist the urge to pity him. I am uncertain, but I doubt I succeeded.

By former standards, he'd be middle aged, but hardly past his prime.

By the standards of the lives we lead, he's already inching towards being a relic of a former era.

Shinobi, by average standards, do not typically celebrate their 41st birthday with their children, ages 11 and 7.

Most shinobi, those who care for children at least, tend to have them far younger than thirty.

At least, this is what I am dimly aware of, having exactly zero close friends to compare families with.

I'm still thinking about it while I stake and trellis my few cucumber plants. They are the first batch of the season, barely longer than a foot and a half or so.

Soon, soon my cucumber feast will be ready. I spare a wretched look at my zucchini plants and resist the urge to make a face at them. For one, I am not childish no matter what anyone else says about the matter, and for another, I am practicing being the bigger person.

I lean my hammer against the post by the garden gate.

If I'm making it to training ground twenty-seven on time, I'm going to need to run.

* * *

Koharu-sensei appears at the edge of training ground twenty-seven at exactly 6:30 am. She looks us up and down once — me sitting on a log, Shinku leaning against a tree, and Dan prodding at an ant hill some distance away and almost sighs.

"This won't do at all."

We stare at her silently.

"I thought you wanted to be a team." Her eyes narrow as she continues to observe us. "Teammates don't have the distance you three do."

It's true.

Beyond the initial greeting this morning, we haven't done much.

Still, closeness isn't something forced. We hadn't the chance to become close, and I really didn't care to share anything that would bring us closer.

I'd lost everyone with a change of worlds once — the girl I'd sworn sisterhood with over a box of peeps, a boy I called brother, a nickname, a _life _that I'd never been given the chance to grow into.

My ambitions had all been laid to waste once.

I'm not eager to try that again.

We look at each other. No one makes a move to do anything. What were we to do?

"Twenty laps."

The tension climbs.

"Thirty." Utatane-sensei crosses her arms over her chest. _I'm waiting. _

I start running.

Behind me, I hear the boys falling in line.

* * *

**A.N. **So this might be joining the ranks of the regularly scheduled fanfiction soon, if only because _checks hand_ the regularly scheduled fanfiction is not updating as quickly as I would like. My writing speed has slowed considerably in this past year especially because I am now working part time as well as being a full time student.

However, I'm extremely blessed to have readers who follow me from one mad idea to another because my brain bounces like one of those pinball arcade games, going "OOOO shiny" at the most esoteric of things.

To all readers, new and old, thank you so much for your constant support. It truly means the world to me.

~Tavina


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Petrames, UmbreonGurl, aflowerydeath, and drowsyivy.**

* * *

"Isn't all that rage so ugly? And isn't it mine, still? Good god, isn't it mine?"

— Ashe Vernon, "_Buried"_

* * *

Our first missions come and go — a garden weeded, a fence fixed, a message routed from one part of town to another.

Utatane-sensei takes us out to dinner.

It does nothing to ease the awkward tension that's arisen between me and the boys. Well, I say arisen, but by all intents and purposes, it was already there, just rising _more_ with the fact that I refuse to talk unless spoken to directly.

I don't have the energy. I don't have the patience.

I don't have the time. There's more missions to make, more katas to train, a long, long road to walk leading to the day my brother puts a sword through his stomach and leaves his corpse for his five year old to find, and _somehow _I have to avert that.

I have to live to avert that.

I can't do it if I'm dead.

Cosmic webs and cosmic scenes. Only seven years old this time around, and already, I'm running out of time.

Where's the need for friends when the sword of Damocles hangs over my brother's head like the fiery condemnation of the only god this world truly has?

Cosmic webs and cosmic tragedies and this whole damn world is a tragedy in various stages of happening.

"Tsutako, tell us about your family, won't you?" Utatane-sensei breaks the silence that's fallen since Dan wrapped up talking about how his little sister had landed a bull's eye with her kunai training the other day.

I open my mouth to begin. "I have a mom, Hatake Ume, a dad, Hatake Hayashi, and an older brother, Hatake Sakumo."

As far as I know, we have no other living family.

But then, maybe they were just off on a ten year s-rank mission and no one was at liberty to tell me they existed.

Maybe I have a whole uncle or aunt or long lost sibling out there that I'd never even heard of. Maybe Mom and Dad had a first set of kids who died young and aren't mentioned and that's why Saku-nii and I are so strangely _young _compared to the age they happen to be at the moment.

The secrets buried in the back garden of our family history aren't exactly things we discuss.

Utatane-sensei sighs. "You know very well that's not what I meant when I said tell us about your family, Tsutako."

_What else is there to say? _I think to myself, even though I do not say this aloud. That would be back talk, and back talk is rude.

"Your dad is Hatake _Hayashi_?" Dan asks. I can see the stars in his eyes, the reverent awe of someone who has not in fact, ever met my dad and only happened to hear that he was a war hero high up in the ranks and in extremely high demand. "Can I meet him?"

It almost makes me wonder who he thought my dad was this entire time, and also why he'd adopted Dad as a personal hero, someone he wanted to _meet. _

In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure why anyone would.

"He's not home."

Two weeks after coming home and sleeping on the couch or the floor for that span of time, Dad had been called away again in the middle of the night.

I can see Dan trying to open his mouth for another question, but it's really best to head this off at the pass right now. "I don't know when he's coming back, so no you can't."

And even if I did know, woe be it for anyone else to know that there's trouble in paradise.

There are some secrets too secret to share.

Or maybe, if we're talking about our family secrets, that would be exactly all of them.

I haven't seen Mom in three days and the last time I did, it'd been in passing as she heated up water for instant coffee in the microwave, and she'd barely made any sign of acknowledgement at all as I struggled into the house with my profusion of cucumbers, muddy from running too many laps in the rain.

Saku-nii is gone too, some other C-rank mission taking him away as his jounin-sensei prepped his team for the Chunin Exams this summer.

Given that it's held in Kusa in a few month's time, I've no doubt that I won't see him around much either.

Our family of four spins on entirely different orbits than each other. In another life, maybe I would've reached out and tried to glue our disparate pieces together, holding onto whatever scraps of _family _I could find.

But I am tired.

And in this life, I let our orbits spin out into the silence of greater voids.

My mutiny at having to actually _describe_ my familial situation must've shown on my face, because while Utatane-sensei presses her lips together and a crease arises between her brows, she doesn't push me further.

Instead, she follows me home.

I make my way through the dingy alley down to Kobayashi-san's shop and wonder if I could persuade Miyoboshi-san, the tailor, to teach me how to repair the rips in my mesh shirts instead of taking it into him all the time.

But then, maybe he doesn't want to lose a customer, he's got fair few of those as it is. No one down here is wealthy, but I'd never been comfortable in the lighter, airier, bigger shops closer to the center of the city anyway.

I come — I _came_ — from places where grime didn't matter as much as the smile behind the counter, the whisper of _belonging_, of being someone known and loved. And while I cannot say for certain that I am loved, at least here I am _known_, known as Hatake Tsutako and not just as a paying customer.

It's worth more than gold.

I ignore Utatane-sensei's existence behind me the best I can. She hasn't tried to talk to me, and I haven't tried to talk to her ever since we finished eating dinner in the barbeque place.

Kobayashi-san bristles when he sees her though, something of a fire in his black eyes. "Who're you?" he asks, his arms crossed over his bloody apron, frown carving deep lines into his face until he looks _far _older than he has right to be. "If y'ain't a customer, y'can wait outside, can'tcha?"

Strange how I didn't really notice his lower alleys accent until he had to speak to my sensei. Most of the time, all we're talking about is what I'm buying or if I need help sharpening my kunai.

"That's my jounin-sensei, Kobayashi-san." I tell him, because most of the time, civilians tend to offer shinobi their respects.

And I suppose I've always figured that that's why Kobayashi Yuuto was fond of me. He'd have probably been a shinobi if he wasn't also deaf in one ear.

He sharpens kunai like he knows what he's doing though he's forgotten the exact idea of using them.

He doesn't budge a centimeter. "So? Ain't a customer is she?"

Utatane-sensei stays silent for a moment more, before I hear her slowly exhale and then the jingle of the bell over the doorway as she steps outside into the street.

Down here in the lower alleys, it's a bit of a stab in the dark to figure out who's really out wandering the streets, civilian or shinobi, but I like it here.

I like it here because it's one of the few places in Konoha I've found that reminds me a little bit like home.

Even though no one speaks Chinese here, either Canto or Mando or any other form of Chinese, the lower alleys remind me of Chinatown, with its curved tiled roofs and little porches, the cobbled together look of the street, the way all the storefronts here are cramped and squished together looking, the way red paint flakes off of the two little pseudo-columns outside of Kobayashi's shop.

It's quieter here though, no crowds of people to lose yourself in. I miss the sounds of the bustle, the noise and the lights, but at the same time, I can't find myself in the crowds closer to the center of the city either, just another face, just another life.

I linger uneasily in the inbetween.

"She following you for a reason, Hatake-chan?" Kobayashi-san asks as he reaches into the freezer to unhook the two chickens I buy every week. "I can always send you out the back door if she is, and file some complaint or other with the military police."

It's more than I'd expected him to care. He's a civilian, this sort of territorial in the face of shinobi comes with its own set of woes.

"No, you don't have to." I reach for the chickens. "She's my sensei, complaining wouldn't do anything."

I don't miss the way his eyes narrow, and his frown deepens, though he doesn't say too much afterwards. "Uh-huh, Hatake-chan."

I shrug, give him my attempt at a smile. "It's only the truth, Kobayashi-san." I've been a liar for a long time, even though I try to tell the truth.

So I try to tell him the truth.

"Uh-huh." He says again and rings my purchase up for the family tab. "You watch out for yourself now, Hatake-chan."

"I'll try." I hook two fingers through the handles of the plastic bags, packed with enough ice to keep the chickens cold til I get home.

Dallying aside, it's time to go home. There's still plants to weed, another row of beans I want to stake properly, dishes to wash, laundry to do, katas to practice before bed. Just because my sensei was following me like a silent shadow didn't mean that there weren't any chores to do and the future to prepare for.

* * *

I stake and trellis my bean plants with wooden stakes I'd bought from the local greengrocer and ninja wire I'd co-opted from one of Dad's old packs beaten up enough and with a severe hole in the bottom so I know he's tossed it into the back of the cupboard in the dojo and completely forgotten about it, backing up my trellis with a long, long cord of twine.

Utatane-sensei passes me another stake wordlessly.

It's been more than she's been doing before.

I don't speak. Sometimes, I would sing while hammering stakes into the ground, but given that generally it would be in some garbled form of Chinglish, whatever I could remember of both English and Cantonese after living some seven years in a place where nobody spoke either, singing isn't something I tend to do with other people.

At least kanji still reminded me of how to write certain words.

Still, year by year, the memories that came from the past run together and bleed into one another like paint mixed with too much water, suddenly red's touched blue and now everything between them is purple tinted.

Which makes no damned sense because I am _haunted _by the past. By my past — both the presence of it in the last life and the lack of it in this one. By living in a story's _backstory. _

Down the line, down the line, it's not that many plants, so I can afford to care for them all adequately, although I have no idea what I'll do when I have to go away for longer periods of time.

Down the line, down the line, unspeakable horrors make all the world run red. The drums of war are sounding on higher mountains in the distance, and not much longer can we linger in the valley of peace.

We'd lost the Nidaime a few years back, a figure of the stuff of legends. The Great War had brought conflict on a scale that no one before had seen.

Armies had marched, blood had spilled, and a few years into this shallow, frail peace, the whole world holds its breath, asking for an end to the carnage and killing.

And here I kneel, with my hands in the dirt, and I remember the future where four wars tear apart this earth in the span of less than seventy years.

I remember destruction and bloodshed and orphans and massacres.

I remember it had been background for sufficient tragedy, a breeding ground for sob stories and sympathetic fates, and I grind my teeth about the god penning this narrative and try to put it away before I explode with rage.

On, then, on to more mundane thoughts.

Do I ask the neighbors, whom I've never been close with, to come in and water my plants? Do I even trust them to do it correctly?

Do I kill my plants because I'll be away and won't let anyone else in to care for them like the worst sort of gatekeeper?

There's only one answer to that.

At least, Kyogi can move and find his own food if I remember to leave it out for him.

The plants can't even do that.

"When does your mother come home?" I glance up at Utatane-sensei, dirt clinging to my fingers and getting under my nails as I weed the tomatoes.

The last time I'd seen Mom was three days ago, which means… "Two nights from now." Question answered, I begin tackling the weeds on the other side on the tomato plant.

She draws a sharp breath, but doesn't _say _anything.

When I next look up, she's gone.

The first thought that passes through my mind is _thank god _followed quickly by _Kyogi should be fed. _

I glare at the remaining tomato plants (unpruned) and wish that they could possibly be pruned without staining my hands an unfortunate terrible green which will soon oxidize into black and be a true _pain _to wash off. A layer of black grime which, once dried, cracked and got everywhere like an agent of persistent damage, ready to dye the porcelain sink a grimy gray color, forcing me to wash it off as well.

Nails clatter across the floor when I throw open the door. "Kyogi!"

He shoves his black nose into my stomach, paws on my thighs. He's a small dog, with floppy ears, a long face, and serious dark eyes.

I trace the white blaze on his snout, laughing when he licks my palm. "Don't, I'm all muddy." He doesn't pay that any of the attention that it's due. "I'll feed you! Stop trying to eat dirt."

He's not a young dog anymore, we're the same age, give or take a few months, but sometimes he's energetic enough that he could pass for a large puppy.

I learned to run by running after him. His energy and enthusiasm for life had brightened me in a time when there wasn't much to be bright for. And I will always love that.

I will always love that.

* * *

We take our first C-rank mission guarding a merchant caravan out to the Land of Rivers. It's slow work, and slow travel, and try as I might to be excited about actually leaving the village for the first time in my life —

The Land of Rivers is muddy.

And swampy.

And there are about fifteen mosquitoes out to suck my blood.

And Dan has been staring worriedly into the underbrush for the past half hour.

And Shinku is muttering under his breath as he swats at his ear.

And there's a soggy squelch squelch squelch of watery mud between my toes, small particles of silt and sand gritting against the skin of my foot, each step forward sinking about two inches deep in mud before the process invariably repeats again with the other foot.

This morning we'd stopped seven times to push nine different wagons of various materials out of the rut they were stuck in due to the mud.

The outlook was just, in general, not fantastic.

And it was only getting worse.

Fording a river that did not have a bridge with a caravan of some 17 wagons did not make for a good scene. For one, I could not trust that Dan would not in fact, slip and drown himself considering he had ended up face down in the mud this morning, and for another, it was a remote location, one that relied on one portion of the water flow being shallower and sandier than the rest, a middling town too poor for a bridge.

The goods were valuable though.

Spices from the temperate climate in the Land of Fire always were.

That made for a bad combination.

Horses strained against the current. Water sloshed over our feet. Gravel cut deep into our sandals. Shouts of both warning and excited success rang through the air. The creak of old wood and the shifting of packages made it hard to really pay much attention to anything than the success or failure of each wagon to make the crossing.

I scouted on the opposite bank of the river, patrolling the three wagons that had already made their way across.

Shinku guarded the river passing, standing waist deep in the rushing water.

At this stage of the game, water walking would just be a waste of chakra. Best just keep it to the basics for now, just in case there were foreign ninja. It wasn't like any one of us was a chakra powerhouse with enough extra to throw around without any thought, not even Utatane-sensei, though this I'd only learned during our mission briefing.

This was our first time out, so there'd been a rundown of our meager skill set, and Utatane-sensei had outlined her own to us. It was enough to shock us into awe, mostly, but it still had its weaknesses.

Tanigakure was a weak village, and reclusive enough that they should not be a threat this far north of their general location, but suspicion and general paranoia were better than being dead.

Utatane-sensei and Dan brought up the rear where a large portion of the wagons had gathered in anticipation of the river crossing.

I spot the gleam of metal from the other side of a covered wagon. Through the slats of the wooden boards, it shines, a sharp contrast to the murky greenness of the damp jungle that is the Land of Rivers.

I round the side of the wagon just in time to spot at least one bandit lurking in the greenery.

The gleam was nothing more than a pitchfork, and in the space between thoughts, something from my past life rears its ugly head and says that I should hardly kill someone who couldn't even properly defend themselves.

But then reality reasserts itself.

If this merchant caravan didn't hire ninja, the people trying to make an honest living might die.

Besides, if I did nothing, we would fail this mission.

And none of us could afford to fail our first C-rank mission.

My hand drops to the hilt of my sword. I pull my shoulders back face forward while walking, adopting the swagger of someone who is _patrolling_ but not in any way, concerned about what is about to take place.

A loose grip. A leisurely walk. Shoulders thrown back, chin raised, eyes for the most part, looking forward.

There's no way to sound the alarm, as spread out as our team is, without prompting the bandits to start their attack, like dropping one domino and starting a cascading chain of chaos.

It's up to me now.

_How many? _Spreading my senses outwards, I start counting.

One there, gleam of a pitchfork among the murky green. Another there, underneath a shrub shaking from something more than wind. Another there, marked by a crack in the greenery, branch still bleeding sap.

I make my way lazily forwards, still counting as I go.

Perhaps they could've deceived civilians — being no more than civilians themselves — but even someone who had the bare minimum of shinobi training could see how someone had been here.

Disturbances in the underbrush, broken twigs, crushed leaves, the unfortunate gleam of a metal weapon catching in the sun.

I count five.

One step.

Two.

In one movement, I launch myself towards the first attacker in the thickness of the jungle floor.

The sword Dad had given me slices through the pitchfork's handle like a kitchen knife through a frozen tomato.

I turn with the momentum, bringing the blade across the back of the man's knee before he has the time to react.

It hits bone. I feel the shudder of a sudden slowing in my wrists, all the way up to my elbow, but this kata has a follow through.

Follow through.

I pull the sword from the wound.

Blood flies.

It'd happened fast enough that there hadn't been time for a scream.

He goes down, a disabling wound, enough that he could no longer attack. I bring the hilt of my sword down on the back of his skull for insurance.

Once.

Twice.

Wrists gone numb with the shudder of force it took.

Onto the next.

A slash through the abdomen. I bring the blade across the neck as the figure crumples.

I do not think about what this means.

The next figure manages to bring his weapon, a hoe, down in my general direction.

I parry the square blade with the flat of my sword, metal screaming against metal, arms straining.

By now, Shinku had picked up the sounds of the fight over the rush of the river.

A kunai sprouts from the figure's throat.

Another down.

Onto the next.

* * *

**A.N. **There's...going to be a lot to unpack after this mission. Mostly because Tsutako doesn't have a real support system so much as she has people who think that they're her support system.

I've been trying to update stuff as quickly as possible! The semester's just started so there's definitely a little bit more breathing room than I had last semester.

Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed, favorited and followed. You all are really lovely, and that brings me a lot of joy.

~Tavina


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by UmbreonGurl, drowsyivy, petrames, and fishebake.**

* * *

"Emptiness is all, it raised me as I am"

— Zoltán Böszörményi, "The Dust of My Existence"

* * *

It tried Utatane-sensei's venerable patience to deal with the hysterics that came from the merchants discovering that there were dead men in the underbrush. It is unclear exactly if the merchants had particularly noticed that there were bandits out to kill them, but I suppose that is the way of attacks in the real world.

They happened too quickly for one who wasn't aware of them to figure out, especially when one side were trained soldiers and killers — however young we were — and the other side were…farmers. Previously farmers, by the choice of their weaponry.

It did _not _seem to matter that if Shinku and I hadn't killed the attackers, _they _would likely be the dead men in the underbrush.

Really, what was most shocking about it wasn't the killing and carnage that we'd engaged in, it was them acting as though they had no idea that this was a logical outcome of hiring shinobi. Sure, spices were attractive, but hiring shinobi implied _money. _It implied that there were things to steal and things worth protecting while traveling.

The flash of Konoha metal was enough of a lure for men who didn't know any better, didn't know that shinobi themselves butchered regular men for money and carved up the landscape in ways bulldozers only dreamed they could.

Most civilians...don't understand shinobi on a fundamental level.

We're like square pegs being fitted to round holes. It doesn't work unless you lop off our corners.

Shinobi are killers, and even if I was just blooded this afternoon, it hadn't made me any less _lethal _before that.

So yes, it'd tried Utatane-sensei's patience to deal with the merchants who'd burst into hysterics about something or other as Shinku, Dan, and I dug some shallow graves in the name of Konoha.

"I don't like this." Dan whispers. He keeps his head low, keeps the shovel moving, but he talks nonetheless. "I don't like the way they're looking at us now."

And to be sure, there was a sense of distrust about the caravan now.

Disillusioned perhaps that we were not a silent girl, a gentle boy and a grumpy boy.

That we are not children, not the way they know children.

And that they can't look at us with parental fondness and think of children they know.

"Can't do anything about it." Shinku says as we drag another corpse into a grave by the limbs. "The sooner we finish digging, the sooner we can get out of here."

He'd puked in the bushes after we'd confirmed that all five attackers were dead. It'd been the smell, probably. The stench of death is kind of a heavy one, even if all I'd smelled before this had been dead pigs at the butcher shop.

But now he seemed as right as rain. Heavy shovelfuls of dirt tamped down on the death.

I say nothing, having nothing in particular to offer Dan, in way of encouragement or otherwise.

I lived with emotional poverty on a daily basis. There is nothing to offer anyone.

* * *

That night, when we break for camp, Utatane-sensei gathers us all together, looks around at us questioningly before sighing.

"Debrief?" she asks, almost resigned.

"Targets were sighted by me on the far shore. I neutralized one through three and then Shinku and Dan reacted to dispatch the other two." I relay the information in the simplest of terms, with the fewest of words.

If more information is needed, it'll be given.

But other than that, I've said all I need to say. Two sentences were enough to sum up the lives, and more importantly, the deaths of five men.

Suddenly, I am tired. I hadn't been tired all day, even though my hands kept stinging, even without touching the hilt of my sword, even though nothing was wrong with them, even though I hadn't hit anyone for hours now.

None of it truly mattered.

We'd left five corpses in some shallow graves about six or seven miles back.

And I'd scrubbed the blood off of me, and my hands in the river as well as I could, but the raw sting of it stuck under my fingernails likely wouldn't be going away any time soon.

Shinku had scrubbed his hands raw and red in the murky river water.

Looking at him do it, I could only feel something in my hollow chest, moving.

I _wanted _to do the same, wanted to rub my whole body raw, but I didn't.

I don't.

It wouldn't be enough.

Utatane-sensei looks at all of us some more, this time, the boys silent and as tense as I felt, and almost sighs. "You did what you had to for the mission, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel badly about it."

We are silent for the most part.

She continues, "if any of you want to talk, I'm open. At any time."

It's a nice thought I guess.

Nice in the way only thoughts could be.

* * *

It takes me a good while to realize that my hands are shaking. It'd likely started slowly, when I was distracted, stealing into the room like a ghost.

Like branches in a high gust of wind, I shudder in time to an invisible chill, a fever flush breaking across my cheeks.

I should put the dish I'm washing down.

I should put it down, put it down before I dropped it, but my fingers are curled to claws, unable to bend to my command.

My feet are rooted to the floor, knees locked so tight they ache, and my whole body shakes.

I watch it happen, completely detached from what was happening, as though staring at my hands from three feet away, watching them shudder like my bones want to crawl out of my skin.

The plate slips from my fingers and crashes with a sharp crack, porcelain shards spinning every which way across the floor, and all I can muster, staring at myself so far away with no energy at all was a tired _oh. _

_I should pick that up. _

I should clean.

I should, but as suddenly as the shaking had begun, it stops, and leaves behind a deadly stillness.

I brace my back to the counter, but that doesn't matter. My aching knees give out, and I slide slowly onto the floor.

There sitting on the floor back at home, I shatter like the plate that'd slipped from my nerveless fingers and crashed into the wooden floorboards below.

I wonder if there's still a girl buried here underneath all this scar tissue.

I wonder if she can even breathe.

When was the last time I breathed? I don't know.

I force myself to take a gulping breath.

Hungry. I'm so goddamn _hungry. _

I'd died so young last time, and it'd been unfair.

There'd been so much I didn't do. So much I'd never be able to do, now that I'd died and been reborn.

_I never wanted this. _Not the rebirth, not the new life, not the blood, the rust, the _sin. _I'd wanted to _be _someone once.

I'd wanted to be someone once.

I would never be her again.

And in this life, I'd been born so goddamn hungry. Hungry for every goddamn thing I'd lost.

A younger sister for an older brother. Black hair for white.

Cantonese for a foreign language that had never fitted right on my tongue.

The old world, the old world, and everyone I'd loved and who loved me for this family of shattered pieces, never to be put back together whole.

What I had, what I hadn't appreciated enough, what I'd been — it will never be again.

I'd felt it in the blood running hot and sticky over my hands, felt the crack of bone, felt the _jolt _ringing its way up my wrists when I smashed in that man's skull.

It all pressed in close, thick and cloying. _You get to live, _the ghosts whispered. _But this is your price._

_You get to live, but how are you any better than the men you left in that clearing? _

_They were stealing likely so they could eat. _

_You were killing for what? The idea of a city? A place to be safe? What were you killing for? _

The price of living was other people's lives.

I feel a scream crescendo in my throat.

I kill it in its cradle, another expression extinguished before breath could give it life.

I sit there in the empty kitchen for a long, long while, before peeling myself off of the floor and sweeping up the shards of broken pottery.

Always the practical one. Always the one to shoulder a burden.

How many years will it take to wear me out this time?

* * *

"One day," Utatane-sensei tells me, "you're going to meet a problem you can't cut through with a sword, Tsutako." She looks like she disapproves of something that had happened during our "team bonding activities" in training ground sixty-nine.

The irony of the number is not lost on me. However, training ground sixty-nine was, in fact, its own sort of fresh hell. Located a little ways outside of Konoha proper, it was a small, fenced in part of the badlands, deep gullies and rushing streams and a land pockmarked with dead ends, sinkholes and deceptive looking safe havens.

A proper natural maze for an obstacle course filled with traps, explosive tags, trip wires and other sharp pointy things to take our heads off.

What she disapproves of though, I have _no idea. _

"We completed the mission objectives." We'd completed the mission in relatively fast time too, carrying the three frail eggs through a landscape hell bent on getting rid of us, without nary a hint of a crack on any of them.

We'd survived some _five days _inside the hellscape that was training ground sixty-nine.

And somehow, despite everything we did, we made it through, eggs uncracked.

"I know you're intelligent enough to consider other possibilities." Utatane-sensei pins me with a hard look. "What was the real purpose of this exercise?"

_Getting to know each other. _And I certainly knew enough about Dan at the end of this, through his chattering and my own observations if nothing else. Shinku too, had provided at least a little more of himself.

He has an older sister. Who knew.

"Spending more time together. Getting to know our skill sets better."

The boys and I haven't really been able to fully showcase our skills before, even though we've been a team for nearly four months now, slogging through training and D-ranks and the occasional C-rank mission.

And now we did, I knew exactly who I was working with.

"You didn't say a word more than necessary to either Shinku or Dan during the whole five days you were stuck in training ground sixty-nine." There's a frown trying mighty hard to not work its way onto Utatane-sensei's face. "How are they supposed to get to know you?"

"There's not much to know," I tell her. I wasn't going to start talking about my _life _while sitting outside with two boys, children really, and just hope that they would understand.

What could I even begin to say?

_Hello, my name is Hatake Tsutako. I have an absent dad who's never refused giving his country anything, a distant mom who works on projects I don't have the clearance to know about, and an up and coming elder brother who's going to make chunin this year. _

_Before I was Hatake Tsutako I was — someone else with a life and dreams and — a whole world. _

A whole world gone.

What could I even begin to attempt telling anyone?

Not speaking unless spoken to. Not speaking unless it was necessary.

I didn't really see the point in talking.

"Your refusal to get to know your teammates or let them know you will get all of you killed." Utatane-sensei pins me with a _look_. "Why did you choose to become a shinobi, Tsutako?"

I wasn't aware I had much of a choice.

I just had to look at where I _was, _what family I'd been born to to know it wasn't a choice. It was never a choice at all, even if it looked like I had options. There are no options.

There's only a cruel god penning lines and inevitable disaster in the future.

I took this path to save my own skin, a chance of a better future for the brother I adored, something to hold onto that I knew how to do. I'd liked swords well enough in my past life. So why does it feel like a slow damning of faith all the same?

I shrug. "Why not?"

I turn the question back to her. Why not, indeed.

* * *

Sakumo-niisan hasn't been home for a while now, and I had too many zucchini to know what to do with, having planned for him to be home when planting the second and third batches.

I hate almost everything about zucchini, from the texture to the misfortunate prickles that come with the plant leaving angry red rashes on my arms.

But now I had too bountiful a harvest and not enough apathy to just start binning all of them.

They're still edible. Maybe someone else would want them.

But who would?

I didn't know anyone, weirdly enough, despite living in this world for some eight years now and counting.

And I doubt that Kobayashi would really care for seventeen zucchini winding up on his doorstep.

One or two wouldn't be unappreciated, but seventeen is too much for one man, even if he is younger than he looks, late twenties at most, even though his eyes were far more tired.

I have no doubt that he _did _eat, even if I never saw him do so — I only saw him for half an hour a week at _most, _of course he ate — but at the same time, I have seventeen zucchini with more on the way and absolutely nowhere to put them.

One man does not seventeen zucchini need.

But if one person did not, in fact, require seventeen zucchini, perhaps multiple people all at once would prefer something like seventeen zucchini.

With a slight sigh, I rummage around in the cabinets beneath the kitchen counter searching for a collection of wicker baskets that I'd seen under there, although we never had any occasion to use them for much of anything.

But then, that left the wonderful question of — how many zucchini per basket? Four? Five? — and then still further — how far did I really want to walk to give away these items of very little value anyway?

Seventeen is not a number evenly divisible by anything except one and seventeen.

With the belated realization that seventeen is, in fact, prime, I end up just stuffing a random assortment of zucchini into each basket until I run out of baskets.

The singular zucchini that sits on the kitchen table can go straight into the trash when I get back.

Gathering up the five baskets and their uneven number of zucchini, already a thought that gives me a headache, I resolve to sneak as many as I can onto porches unnoticed until I run out.

Did any of my neighbors even like zucchini? Well, I'll find out.

* * *

Mom comes home that night. Strangely, this time, she seems to be looking for me, because instead of crashing into bed, or making herself more coffee and cooking enough food to last us for the week, she pauses by the door of the dojo and waits for me to notice her.

I _do _notice her midway through a kata as she opens the door. I'd noticed her when she came into the house, but dismissed it as a typical thing for Mom to do when she either ran out of instant coffee in the lab or needed an actual bed to sleep in.

But now she's paused here, at the actual doorway of the dojo and stands there, even now, in silence.

I finish the kata, sweat dripping from my brow and turn towards the doorway, where Mom stands.

She's not really that young either, now that I have a chance to look at her fully under the bare electric lights. It's been at least a few months now since we were face to face like this.

There's a few iron gray locks snaking their way through her braid.

With a jolt, I realize that they'd been there for a while now. Mom's hair hasn't been just dark brown in a long time.

The blue of her eyes still cuts sharp as a knife though. Hatake Ume is no fool.

"Mom," I muster a smile for her. "You're home."

It's nice of her to come see me. I hadn't expected it with how busy the work at the lab has been. Even in peacetime, and this is only a temporary peace — people could see that now, tension frittering throughout the gatherings, civilians becoming withdrawn — the Research and Development sector of Konoha's forces could not afford to stop.

"Tsuta-chan," she begins. "Your sensei mentioned something to me in the lab today, and I thought maybe we should talk about it."

Suddenly, the warm thought that Mom had come home to see me dissipates.

It isn't about me after all.

"Oh." I sheathe my sword, drop it onto the rack by the wall and roll up my foam practice mat. "I didn't know Utatane-sensei went to talk to you."

"She drops by on occasion." Mom leans against the doorway, her arms crossed, white of her lab coat in the corner of my vision. "She tells me you have attitude problems."

Attitude...problems. _I _have attitude problems? My sensei had gone and disturbed Mom so she could gossip about how I had attitude problems?

Whatever shreds of trust I have for Utatane Koharu vanishes like dew in the morning sun.

"I didn't know that." There aren't any more tasks I could distract my hands, with, so I clasp them together before me to stop them from fidgeting and turn to face her again.

"Apparently she has had a hard time asking you to share your thoughts and feelings with your teammates." Mom runs a hand through her hair and sighs. "Tsuta-chan, you're going to have to learn to work with people you don't like, you know?"

Something starts sinking in my stomach. Like stepping backwards off of a roof, my spirits free fall, no bottom or end in sight. "What am I supposed to be sharing?"

My voice sounds so small.

The first conversation Mom and I have had in _so long, _and it's about how much I've failed to live up to expectations.

"What are your teammates sharing?" Mom comes to sit down on the floor of the dojo in front of me, her legs crossed, standard blue shinobi sandals catching the light. "She's not asking for too much, just that you blend in a little more, Tsuta-chan."

Somewhere, my grasp of self keeps falling, falling, falling, falling. I dread when it has to hit the bottom.

_Blend in. _

But I don't know how to blend in. Dan and Shinku, I didn't even _like them. _

We're a team because we were assigned together, but I have nothing in common with them besides that and nothing I wanted to talk about with them.

"Oh, okay." I hear myself say instead. I want to ask how I should blend in, what I ought to say, but I don't. The words smother inside me, and drown, choking on the invisible smoke in my lungs.

"That's it," she says, patting my shoulder once or twice. "It won't be that hard, Tsuta-chan. You're a good kid."

"Mom, can I ask you a question?"

She's already rising to go, checking her wristwatch. "Another time maybe. There's something in the lab I have to check up on, and it won't wait."

And before I could say another word, she was gone.

* * *

**A.N. **In which, the angry girl with gardens deals with her zucchini and learns she might have attitude problems. Oh boy.

In other news, I hope everyone has been doing alright. I'm in a state that's under lock down orders, so guess who hasn't been outside in two weeks and has to face all of her screaming works in progress? You guessed it. It's me.

Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed, followed, and favorited. Y'all are great. Stay safe out there.

~Tavina


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by petrames, drowsyivy and UmbreonGurl.**

* * *

"Experience taught her.

Hurt raised her.

Neither defined her."

— Adrian Michael

* * *

Since I'd promised Mom I'd try fitting in the last time we spoke, I end up at the barbeque place that Koharu-sensei tells us to be at a little bit earlier than I usually do, mud still clinging to my standard issue blue sandals and my straw hat still clinging to my neck bouncing up and down as I walk.

I'd brought another basket of zucchini too, because the sheer number of them overflowed my ability to shove them off on my neighbors and Kobayashi — this is the _last, _the very _last _time I plant seven zucchini plants for the sake of 'making Saku-nii happy' — so here we are, take two on trying to get to know this team and seem _personable. _Friendly.

Like a friend.

Like a human. A person you could talk to, never mind that I had no interest in trading small talk with Dan, Shinku or Koharu-sensei.

Never mind that it's been nearly a year now since this team began. It'd crossed through a mild winter and straight into a muggy spring. And now it is summer again, and I still barely cared about either of these two boys, and I doubt they care about me.

I didn't _need _any more friends, and I didn't want them either.

Look at what friendship got me in my last life.

I'd lost and I'd lost and I kept right on losing right up until the world went mad, and I lost my life. I'd thought I had nothing else _left _to lose. After all, there wasn't anything after life I had _left _to lose.

Except…

My new world was even worse than the last. This world didn't go mad the year I turned twenty, a sophomore in college with dreams of my own just out of reach. No, quite frankly, this world went mad the first time its cruel god picked up a pen and started putting together concept sketches, which means that the world is built on a _foundation _of sheer madness starting with the alien bunny goddess in the moon and ending with me, Hatake Tsutako, who shouldn't even exist except perhaps as an unsung line of tragedy in my future-nephew's life.

And even though I _know _that my tragedy has been prewritten, fated like nothing else because the god in the machine has determined anyone connected to Hatake Kakashi (yet to exist) is to end in burning flames or worse, I am _still _determined to claw a path out of it alive anyway, even if I don't know what the price is for _living. _

But how sane is sane in a world built on madness and a need for profit? Sanity in an insane world is just insanity itself.

So no, I don't want any friends. I barely want my own name.

But it's not a choice about what I want right now.

I promised Mom I'd try to fit in, and if I didn't even give it my best effort then I'd be a liar. Whatever else I've been lately — a murderer, a thief, a trespasser — I'm not a liar.

Not yet, anyway.

I plunk the basket of zucchini down on the table. "Help yourself."

I do not sound as convincing as I think I do, because everyone around the table looks at me for a moment, my mud bedraggled pant hems, the angry red scratches on my arms since I'd foregone a long sleeved shirt, due to the murky late August heat.

"Cucumber?" Dan says, almost hesitantly reaching towards the basket.

How had he survived until age nine by — "_Zucchini_," I snap at him. _That's a zucchini, the bane of my existence and— _

Oh, but what did it matter?

"Why did you bring us zucchini?" Shinku blinks at me slowly from his place across the table.

For the love of—

I turn around, hands balled into fists at my side, and suddenly I possess no appetite and no desire to see either of these two idiots again.

If we washed out before making chunin as a team, then I could live with that.

There's always field promotions. There's always _something. _Anything else that isn't this hell pit of a team and hell of this existence.

Koharu-sensei hasn't arrived yet, which is just as well. "Have a nice life." I toss over my shoulder as I walk off.

"Tsutako-chan?" Dan calls from behind me. "Tsutako-chan, where are you going?"

I make no attempt to answer, because that works just as well.

* * *

I find myself almost crying, even though the tears are more in anger than any form of real hurt while ripping the weeds out from around my tomato plants.

At least I _liked _tomatoes, and at least tomatoes cared enough to like me, more or less well as I could possibly be liked by anything.

Despite the change of worlds, despite the change of family, despite the change in language, change in culture, and change in how I looked, despite everything being mad and becoming a trained killer at age eight or so, the _plants _are still the same.

Even if I couldn't possibly call them the names I am _used _to calling them.

There's no Latin in this world either. _Solanum lycopersicum_ does not exist. But a tomato is a tomato, and I know one when I see one, even if I can't put it under a slide or extract its DNA to confirm that it is in fact, a tomato as I remember it.

I have no way to confirm if any of the plants I see in this hell world are like the plants I remember, but the feeling of dirt underneath my fingernails is the same.

I still recognize clover and lambsquarter and thistle and henbit, and I take great delight in ripping it all up and away from plants that I actually _do _enjoy.

Weeding is an oddly therapeutic action, more so than running through a sword kata or practicing a fist fight against a wooden training dummy. It's more tangible, easy to see the hurts inflicted by cucumber beetles and aphids and see the growth the plants make in the areas that I've weeded and the areas I haven't.

There's a satisfaction to be found in picking vegetables that I'd grown myself and using them in cooking, stopping only by Kobayashi's butcher shop to pick up meat.

A feeling of accomplishment.

Something I've built rather than something I've broken. A reminder that life and death hang on the same frail thread, that the hands that kill are also the same as the hands that nurture.

Sometimes it's good to remember that I am good for something other than killing.

Not a good daughter, or a good sister, or a good teammate, or a good student, or a good friend, and somewhere down the line I might fail these plants too by forgetting to tell the old lady next door that I'd be out, so please water my plants, but I haven't yet.

Unlike the other things.

I don't want friends, and I don't _need _more people in my life to care about and lose, but in the end, that doesn't matter. A good person would do her right duty and make a friend or two, do normal child things that would make her parents proud instead of confused, be just outgoing enough that it would make her brother happy, and _somehow _manage to get along with Thing One and Thing Two on her team.

That's what good people do to get by and live happily.

That's what good people do, but I am not good.

"Tsutako?"

I don't bother to look up. There's Shinku's feet in standard issue blue shinobi sandals that come in all sizes but never fit exactly right and a splatter of mud on his closer pant leg. "What?"

It's less a question, really. _Just tell me what you want so we can get this over with. _

"Are you okay?"

Whatever I'd been expecting, it wasn't that.

"_What?_"

For one, I didn't expect Shinku to ask me anything remotely like that. For another, I'm just fine. Peachy even.

"Y'know," he says, because he won't shut up — _why won't you just shut up — _"you really act like you're going to die before you turn thirty."

"Statistically speaking, half of our graduating class will die before turning thirty." That's why there are four graduating classes every year after all, one for each season, churning out soldiers for Konoha even as she denies that she is preparing for a new war.

Some of our graduating class has died already. Missions gone wrong, bad intel, lack of competence because they were just children, accidents, and other mundane tragedies.

By the time we're thirty, only half of us will remain. Some of us will be encouraged to start a family, get a kid, or two, or three, or seven. And the cogs in this machine grinds us all to dust and nothing more.

"That's a _wartime _average." Shinku scuffs his toe against the ground, kicking up dust into my face, making my nose sting and smart.

"What makes you think we won't see a war?" I rip up another handful of lambsquarter and try not to scream with the irony of it all.

"God," he says. "You're so _weird, _Hatake. I came here to ask if you were coming back, not to talk about the death rate. You're depressing as fuck."

"Then you can fuck right off." I don't regret that I say this. "I'm just peachy, and you've already ascertained that I'm not going to come back, so fuck off and leave me alone, Yuuhi."

He kicks up another cloud of dust. "Wow, there's no need to—"

"Just _leave me the fuck alone._" I finally turn my face up to him, teeth ground tight together, lips drawn back. I can _feel _whatever thought of a pleasant facade start to crack over the sheer _rage. _

How dare. How fucking dare he come to my garden. How dare he tell me I'm a weird depressing bitch when he was the one to bring up the fact that I didn't have a hope of living past thirty anyway.

How dare he _keep kicking dirt into my face. _

He holds up his hands in surrender, but I am seeing white around the edges of my vision, and I rise to my feet, dirt and plant stains clinging to my knees and hands. "Get _out._"

He scrams.

* * *

I go back to the next team meeting with nothing, no basket, no zucchini, not even a pretense at being a functional talkative human being.

I go back, but I _know _I've broken it. I've broken everything, and nothing about these jagged puzzle pieces will fit back together right even if I try glueing it back together with bloody hands.

After all, my tongue and teeth have already torn a chunk out of the center, and _that _wasn't going to get put back right, because it's settled into a deep pit in my stomach instead, and it wouldn't be coming up any time soon.

Utatane-sensei pins us all with a _look _that can only mean nothing good. It's the 'I expect you all to be on your best behavior, so don't disappoint me' look, the one that Dan always wilts under, except this time Shinku wilts too. Given our current behavior, we _are _disappointing.

Unfortunately, the field in which I grow my fucks is barren, and I've none to give the situation.

"I've arranged a meeting for lunch today with another team. Hopefully, it will be an educational and informative experience for the three of you."

Great. More people to put on a face for.

* * *

As it turns out, we're getting lunch with the pre-legendary Sannin and the Sandaime in one of _their _more beloved haunts — the gyudon place off of the main road bisecting the city and running straight to the Tower.

I avoid the place like the plague for a _reason. _And now, here I sit, caged in between Dan and Shinku on a tacky red and white striped plastic bench in a fast food place, although Dan was stuck between me and the aisle so I am _fairly _certain that I could just simply crush him on my way out.

Across from me is…

A younger version of Orochimaru, complete with the deathly pallor, long hair and slit pupiled eyes.

To be perfectly fair to him, he wasn't evil yet. Not even barely pushing it. He's nine years old, for crying out loud. Wasn't like he tortured cats in a back alley or anything.

I'd heard he lost both his parents in quick succession this past spring, sometime while this team was still trudging through the Land of Rivers.

To be absolutely honest to myself, though, I hated him regardless, mostly because he was across from me so I had to at some points meet his gaze, which is politely curious, and I don't even want to _be here. _

"You're Hatake Tsutako." Tsunade says, staring at me with a slight frown. "Your dad's the big war hero of the Great War."

We'd learned about that bit from history books, scant as they were. Hatake Hayashi, war hero and patriot, in the service of the Tower.

What a find, what a find, that a young man from such a small shinobi family could be such a larger than life figure, famous for the way he'd taken out entire squads by himself with his knowledge of the badlands.

"You got it in one. Have a gold star," I mutter into my beef over rice.

"You're so lucky," she says, a faint tinge of bitterness covering her words. "I bet you get all the good memories with your dad. Most of the time war heroes don't get to make it home alive."

True enough in a sense. She'd lost her grandfather, her great uncle _and _her father in the Great War, so it's not like she didn't have cause to complain.

Each of them had been enshrined as a great war hero too — Senju Hashirama, Senju Tobirama, Senju Yanema.

I grunt. "Haven't seen him in seven weeks."

That seems to throw her for a loop. Enough that she mutters something I don't entirely catch that sounds remarkably like pity while continuing to shovel beef into my mouth.

On the end of the table close to the window, Jiraiya and Shinku have gotten into some argument over, of all things, bees.

Or, I suppose, Jiraiya is arguing very spiritedly for the side of wasps being superior to bees. Either way, I couldn't really tell. I could only tell that the situation is getting dire because Orochimaru is, one, leaning rather close to Tsunade to avoid Jiraiya's flailing arms, and two, Shinku is turning an odd red color.

Dan whimpers.

This place is a lost cause. I don't know _what _Utatane-sensei wanted from us, but it probably wasn't this, even though it does seem like she and the Hokage aren't having a good time either, engaged as they are in a hushed conversation in the booth across the way.

"Do you like gyudon?" The soft voice cuts through the noise effectively and easily, and it could've only come from the person across the table.

Slowly, I raise my eyes to Orochimaru's. He's watching me from over the rim of his plastic bowl, chopsticks clutched loosely in his left hand.

He still looks politely curious, as though trying to be outgoing and friendly.

"Haven't had it before." Before his gold eyed gaze, I feel my unkemptness even more than usual. It isn't even that I dressed oddly this morning or that I looked physically like I'd taken a muddy route next to an ox cart into town this morning, but rather I'd gotten used to angrily snapping at nearly everyone I talked to because they irritated me.

My tongue is a weapon, and it is bladed on both sides, sharp like a dagger to slip between the ribs.

Somehow, though, this softly spoken question provoked a sense of _shame _at my current train of thought and conduct, and that stung far more than anything anyone else has said to me all week.

"I see," he muses, but offers nothing more.

Eventually, he seems to lose interest, gaze shifting to where his sensei still sat, deep in conversation with mine.

I mark the passing of time with the ticking of the wall clock, and try to ignore the fact that Tsunade's joined the argument on bees vs wasps somehow on _neither _side and instead is advocating for...slugs.

Which I hate anyway and salt whenever I find another infestation in my garden, but that's _besides _the point.

If this lunch is supposed to make us friends, it hasn't done its job properly.

* * *

I've grown out of my old clothes, so it's time for the twice yearly clothes shopping expedition, where I go to the tailor and order several sets of the same things preferably an inch or two longer at the arms and legs so I didn't have to come back for another half a year.

Throwing my rather dubious purchases of more green and brown clothing bagged in plastic over my shoulder, I make my way down the street to Kobayashi-san's butcher shop.

He's wrapping cuts of pork belly in wax paper for a rare other customer when I arrive. The elderly woman thanks him in a creaky voice, calling him a "good boy" which doesn't seem to faze him too much.

Not for the first time, I wonder how he manages to keep the lights on and all the meat bought if he's sustained by like, five customers, because that is _all _I've ever seen visit his shop.

But he's a civilian butcher living in a ninja village, and he probably has a family and friends somewhere, so the store's probably not as empty as I think it is.

"If it isn't Hatake-chan," he says, wiping down part of the counter with a rag that looks like it's made of an old shirt.

"Yeah," I sigh, a lock of white hair fluttering in the edges of my vision. I should get it cut, it's choppily shoulder length already. "I might have to be by more often, but with less to buy all the time."

At this point in time, I really don't dictate my own schedule.

The half pound of pork that I'd stashed in the fridge, meaning to cook when I had the time and was less exhausted had gone bad while I was stuck in the Land of Tea, and I still had to clean it out and toss it into the garbage can out front on the curb.

"Change in work schedule?" he asks, leaning his elbows on his counter.

For the first time, I'm struck by the hair line scars on his hands that seemed to speak of kunai practice.

He'd always been so nonchalant about shinobi as well, but then, it's not my place to pry about his past.

"Yeah." I rub a hand over my face, and try and fail to not sigh again. "It's exhausting, Kobayashi-san."

"Mmm, imagine so. Death'll do that to ya." He gestures for me to come around the counter, and takes me instead, into the back of his shop. "Still, you gotta do something to keep from going under, Hatake-chan."

The back of his shop is more personal than the front and the counter. Besides the concrete floor and the hoses, and the door into what I assume is his walk in freezer, there's a rickety set of stairs to the upper floor, where I only assume he lived, and another door into what looks like a kitchen.

He flicks the whetstone on, and gets the water running before sitting me down on his stool and passing me a knife. It's an old one, not too bad of a make but not great either. "When I get too deep in my head I clear it by focusing on something else."

I look at the whetstone running for a moment. "Wouldn't something not electric test someone's integrity more?"

At least, that's what all the moral sayings seem to imply.

He laughs. "Hatake-chan, we're not here to test your moral integrity."

I look for another moment at the dull knife and get to sharpening. The whir of the whetstone and the shriek of metal on stone even against the water _does _comfort me, the racket outside driving away the din in my mind.

* * *

I'm halfway through mopping up the watery blood from the spoiled half pound of pork I'd tossed when Mom comes home.

She sits down at the kitchen table without a word to me, and instead, pours herself a cup of water from the half water filter, shaking it slightly, seemingly waiting for something.

I haven't the faintest idea what she could be waiting for, because she certainly doesn't wait for whenever Dad gets back.

"I'm home!" Saku-nii's cracking pre-teen voice sounds in the front entry hall, a scuffle as he slips off his sandals.

Oh. So that's what Mom is waiting for. From the corner of my eye, I see her smile.

Kyogi's toenails clatter loudly on the floor, and his barks of joy upon discovering Saku-nii's return brings another emotion to my chest.

Jealousy maybe, that my dog is so excited to see him again, and jealousy that Mom would pause whatever work she has to do to be here for his coming home.

But then, this isn't some sort of sick crabs in a bucket game. I don't have to feel like this or drag him down to my level. I do this to my own self.

"Welcome home, Sakumo-kun." Mom drains her glass of water, just as Saku-nii steps into the kitchen.

"Mom!" He throws open his arms. "Mom, look!"

Ah, he's been away for the Chunin Exams in Grass Country, and now he's back, plus one green vest, on his very first try.

Mom must've heard about his promotion through the grapevine and come home to congratulate him.

"Congratulations on the promotion." She ruffles his hair, squeezes his shoulder. "I'm planning to cook something tonight, your favorite?"

He visibly brightens, "thanks, Mom," and comes around to attempt to hug me.

I hold up my hands, rotting pig blood and other horrid half rotted scents — like that one zucchini I'd found that I'd forgotten to give away two weeks ago — sliding messily down my arms. "I'm cleaning the fridge, Nii-san."

He backs away.

* * *

**A.N. **Wow yea, Tsutako's not in a happy headspace right now. But such things are as they are, and this story moves along.

It's been a bit guys! I'm halfway through chapter seven, so hopefully the next update won't be as far away, though as always, I can't really predict when the muse will cough up the next chapter of anything, so here's to hoping.

Stay well and thank you all for the support.

~Tavina


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Beta'd by Petrames, drowsyivy and**** UmbreonGurl.**

* * *

"We're all killers.

We've all killed parts of ourselves to survive.

We've all got blood on our hands.

Something somewhere had to die so we could stay alive."

— if memories could bleed, if dreams could scream | m.a.w.

* * *

My tenth birthday comes and goes with no fanfare of any sort, just another day, another marker of how many years it's been since I've come into this world. Rather sadly, I wonder if anyone knows at all that the eighth of August is my birthday, or if I didn't have to fill it out on my Academy forms every year for three years and then my genin registration forms and every time I ran a mission by myself, if _I _would remember that I was born on eight-eight.

I sit on the porch with Kyogi, watching the rain impact the summer dust, each impact throwing up a tiny cloud of dust in its wake.

Rain is formed high up in the clouds but destined to fall, destined to land on a leaf, or the ground, the roof of the house, to join a million other drops and lose itself in the endless mass, without any distinction.

They say that rain cleanses, but I watch the dust turn to mud and wonder about that. Water can only cleanse when it picks up impurities, damaging itself for the sake of the cleanliness of other objects.

Sometimes, I wonder how long it would take for someone to realize that humans are the same way, formed with hope and grand promises, dreams and the bright mirage beckon of the future, only to realize that we are all the same, indistinguishable from the next one unless it's someone who cares for us.

That we stain our hands in order to clean something else — the idea of a perfect, peaceful world — futilely as the entire world is covered in a layer of mud.

I run a hand through my hair, holding my straw hat against my knees with the other hand. My hair's shoulder length again now and about to get shorter soon, if only because I'd no longer be able to deal with the hassle or the weight.

Or the fact that it's the wrong color if it's always in the edges of my vision.

I don't often look at myself in the mirror, not fully. Sure, I stood in front of it every morning and every night when I'm home to brush my teeth, wash my face, wrangle my hair into some sort of fit state for existence, but that comes down to parts — pieces of a whole, not the whole itself.

So I am aware of what Hatake Tsutako looks like. I am aware that I have white hair and black eyes, a scowl and a small mole by my left eyebrow, but _I _am supposed to have black hair, a round face, and lighter eyes, and even years cannot change that. In this life, I look a lot like my famous father.

Both Saku-nii and I do, especially in the color of our hair, the color of our eyes, for him, thicker, blocky fingers, for me, the width of my feet, and for both of us, the height.

Saku-nii soars gracefully over the rest of his squadmates, even his female sensei, who is in her late twenties as best, while I manage the grace of a half grown goose.

Neither of us really look like Mom.

It's a wonder what the mind can convince itself is true even given the empirical evidence that it's not. White can be black. Black can be white.

It's been nearly two more years now, since Saku-nii passed his first chunin exams in Grass Country and therefore more often out of the house. Meanwhile, Team Koharu still ran C-ranks, and the occasional D-rank, more often than not now, alone.

The borders have been fraught with tension, though there is still the hope with some that war will not come. But that is merely sticking one's head in the sand and hoping the coming flood wouldn't be true.

Knowing what I know, war will come.

It will come with blood, with death, and the screams of thousands.

And then it will come again.

And again.

And again.

Again.

A wheel spinning, crushing everyone in its wake.

What I've learned in this short second life so far is that there is no way for one person's hands to stop the wheel, much less smash it to bits.

Or at least, if this knowledge was meant to stop anything, it should've been given to someone with more strength and courage than me.

I can barely keep all the pieces of myself from spinning off into the orbits of disparate voids, much less a whole family, much less the whole future.

If there was ever any reason to feel empathy for Cassandra, now would be the time. A prophet with doom budding on her lips, but no ears to hear her, no one to tell.

Who could I tell who would believe me? _War is coming, _I'd say.

And the young man in his tower would look up from his reports with a wry expression. _I know. _

And that is all.

War does not come because no one can see it coming until it's too late. War comes because it is curated, because it is timed, because someone or something reaps a reward paid for with the blood of thousands.

And here I sit, ten years old, wondering if my death will be a mere footnote on a mission record. If I could ever hope to be something else.

Beside me, Kyogi whines and shoves his feet against my thighs, blunt nails digging into my skin, though I don't mind. He's gotten older now, and I've been home less to play with him, running courier missions in the north of Fire Country.

I never know what the message I'm carrying says, only that it needs to get to a certain guard station in a certain amount of time, and the fact that I'm a young genin getting sent on these sorts of missions only spells trouble and tension for the state of the village.

Older and more experienced chunin than Saku-nii and most all the jounin had all been called out to man the borders, leaving new chunin like my elder brother to man the mission desks and run in-country missions to keep the economy afloat.

Dad's mission rate has spiked through the roof, enough that I haven't seen him in over six months running now, what with the way that _I, _too, am often out of the house.

Whatever new project Mom is working on, it's made her frustrated enough to take it out on the coffee pot, because the last time I'd seen _that_, the handle had come off and been glued back on by someone with very shaky hands.

And then there's me, a three year genin, running messages to and from the border.

But I'm home enough that I can still stake and trellis my bean plants, pick the profusion of tomatoes from my three tomato plants and figure out what to do with the zucchini that now _no one _not even Saku-nii seemed to be eating before they rotted away into slushy messes in the bottom of the fridge.

Which is all I can ask for, I suppose.

It's a good enough life, all told.

It's not that bad.

* * *

Dad's sitting in the kitchen when I arrive home after a grueling trek through the north of Fire a few months later, bandaging up his arm with a roll of white tape, his grungy pack at his feet, humming some sort of tune I'd never heard of before.

"O-oh out there's a land that time don't command, wanna be the first to arrive, no time for ponderin', why, I'm a-wanderin', not while we're both still alive." There's blood matted in his hair, but it doesn't look like his own, so it's nothing a shower or a quick dunk in the sink wouldn't fix.

"To the ends of the earth, would you follow me?" his mellow baritone rings out over the shabbiness of our kitchen, giving it gold when everything is gray. "There's a world that was meant for our eyes to see…"

Not for the first time, I wonder what country he's picked this song up in, and how far 'to the ends of the earth' he's gone, because this tune has an indie folk air to it, and heavens knows that one can't find _that _sort of music in Fire Country, much less Konoha, which is a distilled microcosm of the larger society of Fire.

"Dad?" I ask, because it doesn't seem like he's heard me come in. "You're home."

"Goose!" He looks up at me with that same fond, boyish smile, though he's now forty-four, hardly a young man by the standards of the company he keeps and the occupation he's still working. "I heard you'd been up to the seventeenth outpost!"

Funny how he always knew where his children were, but we had no idea where to even begin to find him or even if he's still alive.

"I didn't expect you back so soon." He opens his arm to me, the half bandaged one still resting on the table, burn wounds up the inner forearm from the heel of his palm to the elbow like a nasty tattoo sleeve.

I drop my own pack by the door, and go to hug him. "What can I say," I shrug, still somewhat sweaty as he rubs my back. "Your daughter runs pretty fast."

"Just like her old man," he jokes. "I can run pretty fast too, even though the years are catching up a bit."

I want to ask why he's still out wandering the ends of the earth when he's got a home right here he could always come back to, but I don't.

There's never a point in asking, especially since I don't think I'd get a proper answer out of him. It's buried in some half distinct past that he's never talked about, as though he only sprung into existence as my father and some hero of a half described campaign during the last war, fully formed.

Instead, all I offer him is a "take care of yourself, Dad."

He ruffles my hair before rising to head to the shower. "You got it, Goose." He pauses for a moment by the door jamb, looks back at me, a shock of white hair falling into his eyes. "Your present's at the bottom of my pack, I nearly lost it while—" he cuts himself off there before he can tell me what he was actually doing and where. "Anyhow," he shrugs, easy sinew and muscle moving under his mostly destroyed shirt, old scars across his back still visible. "Happy Tenth, my best girl."

I want to hug him again, but all I think to offer before he trudges off down the hall is a semi-watery smile and a croak of "Thanks, Dad."

Someone had remembered, even if my birthday was eight-eight and outside in North Fire, it's already starting to snow.

* * *

I'm sent up north again later that springtime, a pair of light, deerskin boots on my feet instead of the standard issue shinobi sandals — the present from Dad that I'd found at the bottom of his pack still fit me even months on — to an outpost much further north than I'd ever been before, with the task of carrying both a message there and a message back.

The timeframe is a two week trip, and I only pack two changes of clothes, the sword at my side and a survival kit complete with soldier pills. Edible food can be foraged, and I can always catch up on nutrients whenever I ended up back in Konoha, because while the mission scroll said a two week trip up to the outpost and then back down, that assumes that I'd be running nearly a full week there and full week back with a few stops to sleep and eat.

And while I could do that, it's implied by the ramped up presence on our northern borders that Konoha had reason to be concerned with Iwa and Kumo to the northwest and northeast respectively.

Outpost North 49 is tucked up in a mountain pass, on the border of Fire and Waterfall country, and it's cold as winter frost even despite the springtime coming to the rest of Fire.

Waterfall Country, honestly, though I've never been, seems like an ass of a place to go to, considering that the map said it was full of cliffs, broken mountainsides, shale and of course, as its namesake, waterfalls.

And with how cold it still was in the last week of March — wind rushing by while I lope up the mountainside to the outpost rubbing my ears and nose _raw _and leaving an ever present chill on my forehead protector — I don't envy any poor fool who had to live in this outpost and I envy even less anyone who has to live in that _country. _

It is probably cold as Russia, if we really got down to it.

I haul myself up to the level of the outpost built into the lower branches of a Hashirama Tree (though I doubt it had been planted by the Shodai) and knock on the front door. "Message from the Tower."

The man who opens the door is probably in his late twenties, which would've been young for someone in my last world, but absolutely normal here.

It is after all, the early to late twenties crew that faced the highest rate of mission casualty deaths during wartime, which is not altogether unexpected.

The youngest of the genin, even elite ones trained by jounin-sensei are generally kept from the frontlines. Konoha _doesn't _want her soldiers dead before they hit double digits since she's invested enough into us that it wouldn't be cost effective otherwise.

So yeah, a lot of the death toll during wartime comes from those in their late teens to mid twenties — _Konoha's orphanages are always hungry and her funeral parlors always full — _hence, half of us will be dead by thirty if we're lucky.

This man wears the chunin flak jacket, though he could also be a jounin — it's hard to tell these days — with a few scars peppered over his hands, and the blond hair and teal eyes of a Yamanaka. "You're a bit small to be a message runner," he comments, mild and clipped.

_And you're a bit old to be still alive by the end of the war. _

But I don't say that. Instead, I twitch. "What's on the street by the Tower two blocks west of the Academy?" There's never a good way to determine who's who, since I'm not a chakra sensor and it's always _possible _that some foreign shinobi had ended up masquerading as whoever is supposed to be stationed here.

"Ichiraku Ramen." He steps aside to let me in. "Oi, Kotone, the messenger's here."

A Nara woman with a high tail looks up from her slouched sitting position. She looks, at best, a year or two older than the man who'd opened the door. "Really, I couldn't tell."

I expect to see an Akimichi too, just because the clans often get sent out together even if they weren't an InoShikaCho team, since there's no beating genetic teambuilding powers, but instead, there's another clearly non-Akimichi woman lounging in the chair opposite Nara Kotone.

Her long purple braid drapes over the back of the chair, and it looks like she's filing her nails.

I can safely say that I have no idea what family she's from, or what her rank is.

"Mitsuaki," she waves a hand at the man who let me in. "Come back over, we're going to have to draft a reply to this if the Tower sent us a baby genin instead of a bird." She smiles at me, canines a little bit too sharp to be anything except at least part Inuzuka.

Given that she doesn't have their tattoos and her hair, her mother's probably the Inuzuka and her father might have once been a Rain Country native.

"I'm Murasaki Rei. You've probably guessed the identities of the other two here, though I suppose that still bears repeating." She waves a hand at the man, "Yamanaka Mitsuaki," and then at the woman, who waves. "Nara Kotone."

I give them all a short nod. "Hatake Tsutako, delivering a message from the Tower that needs an immediate response, reporting to Outpost North 49."

I hand over the message, divested from the inside sole of my left boot through a _very _handy storage seal that no one would think to look for _there_.

Which is, of course, exactly why Dad had gotten me this pair of boots from god knows where. He's a traveler, I know that much, so he's got plenty of places he _could've _picked up a present.

The Yamanaka whistles, "handy."

The three of them huddle around the table for a whispered message after the wax seal on the scroll is broken, and the Nara reads it over.

I don't bother listening to their conversation. The less I know about what the Tower wants with them, the better, since they're _all _clan or clan adjacent.

And Outpost North 49 is a chokepoint on the Waterfall border, barely two hard days of travel from the southwest border of Earth Country.

So really, the less I know about what they're talking about, the better.

Instead, as they conference and draft a response for me to take back to the Tower, I busy myself with examining their living space. It's hollowed out of the inside of a Hashirama tree, probably not an Original since the Shodai had died in far north of Iron, in the place known as "the Mountain's Graveyard" from a cheap shot in the back, betrayed by what he thought were allies.

So it's one of the saplings planted and propagated by his wife, Uzumaki Mito, because only Uzumaki sealing would be able to make the inside of the tree bigger than the outside.

Even so, the outpost is roughly three rooms big, with a tiny thing that could pass for a studio apartment kitchen, a sink and a counter, a stove with two burners in the room I'm standing in, all the light coming from seals fixed to the ceiling.

I observe, if only because it's a very likely fate that someday I'll be living in a place like this one, waiting on the brewing war.

Finished with their huddle, Nara Kotone scrawls a few words on a scroll that she pulls from her belt pouch and seals it up again with a flick of her chakra while the Yamanaka lights a candle stub and drips a few drops of hot wax on the scroll to make _absolutely_ sure it would be obvious if someone had opened it before it got to the Tower.

It's dropped into my hands, still slightly warm, and I seal it back up again inside my boot before pulling on my shoes and heading out the door.

I'd been at Outpost North 49 for no longer than half an hour.

* * *

I'd pushed too hard to get out of the north of Fire, away from the cold biting at my nose, ears, and fingers, which is why I lose control of the situation and end up running from foreign nin, somehow already deep in Fire.

Which means at least one outpost in the west has been breached, which though, is unclear.

What matters more is getting the message I'd been running from Outpost North 49 back to the village and sounding the alarm. If there's foreign shinobi this far inside Fire, it might as well be a declaration of open warfare.

However, I'm still at _least _two days and nights out from the village, and they're closing in fast.

Earth shinobi, I'd guess from the direction they'd come from, though they wear nothing that identifies them as such.

Three to five of them, from the glimpses I'd been able to catch.

* * *

I'm on the river when the first kunai sings past my ear, through the space where my head had been just a moment before.

I turn, drawing my sword in one motion, and the first of them is upon me.

One block.

One parry.

I use the forward momentum of the water, and my smaller size to duck under their longer reach.

One slash and I am racing forward once again, through the sudden spray of blood.

One down.

Two to four to go.

* * *

Night is falling, and despite the few furious battles I'd had both on and off of the river in the brush, there is _still _someone chasing me.

Whatever had happened to the other three, I doubt they were all dead.

I'd cut arteries, so perhaps those were dead.

I'd cut tendons and muscle too, in my desperation to get away, trailing blood in my wake as I head further and further south, so those were most likely still alive.

Whoever was still following me despite me covering _fifty miles _and counting since they'd started tailing me deeper into Fire Country is most certainly still alive.

Like a game of cat and mouse, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, as if waiting for me to make a move, or a mistake so then they could butcher me from behind.

I slow, trailing blood from where my arms had been scraped by tree branches, a throbbing bruise on my right temple where a much larger man had smashed my head against a rock before I'd managed to stab him through the gut.

* * *

I stumble, moving much slower after the encounter with the explosion release user, their kekkei genkai scorching my arm and side before sheer desperation had forced me to take a bite of their arm.

There are lacerations and burns all over my sides, and I'd ripped at least one thumbnail, thoughts coming slower through the fog.

There's dew on the ground, in the morning light, shining like crystals, the fog hanging in the air, a thousand points of light, bright and searing, cutting into my brain.

A sea of yellow greets me, the warmth of south fire.

It takes a moment to realize that they are flowers, the yellow of rapeseed coming up through the wilting greenery, smelling of oil.

_Oil flower. _I think. _They used to be called oil flower. _

My knees buckle under the weight of my pack, crashing through the greenery and crushed scent of flowers before the darkness on the edge of my vision creeps up to swallow me whole.

* * *

"It's only a child." A woman's voice, from far above me, quiet with worry, sharp with fear. "We should do something. It's only a child."

Sluggishly, I hear the conversation as though from under water, bright lights bursting under my eyelids, the rasp of my throat as I draw breath, dry and hurt.

Everything is heavy. Everything is faint.

I breathe, but only just.

"A shinobi." A man's voice, murmuring. "A killer."

Something in my mind laughs at this. _I didn't want this, oyaji. Not this world, not this life, not this death, not like this. _

But I am tired, and the lights against my eyelids are blinding, sharper than flame.

I sink.

* * *

**A.N. **I've been really inspired to write stuff lately! So here's the next chapter of Prophet, we've time skipped roughly two years ahead from chapter six and this chapter covers roughly four to five months. I'll be headed back to in person learning in mid August or so, so I have no idea how long this inspired streak will keep up, but I'm hoping it'll hang in here for the time being.

Thank you so much for your support everyone. It truly makes me the happiest.

~Tav (Leaf)


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. **Beta'd by Petrames, drowsyivy, and UmbreonGurl.

* * *

"I feel so lonely, like childhood again."

— Anne Carson, _Plainwater, The Anthropology of Water: Kinds of Water_

* * *

"Wenqing!" Mama calls. "If you don't get up soon, you'll be late for school."

But my bed is comfortable, and the blankets are heavy, warm, weighing me down all around. If I get up, it will be cold.

"Wen_qing_," Mama calls, more insistent this time, slightly frazzled. Somewhere in the distance, my younger sister wails. "You're going to be late! Get out of bed!"

I make a motion to, still groggy enough that my eyes are closed.

But everything grows heavier around me, a gathering dark so deep I couldn't get up even if I wanted to.

Has my sister always been this prone to screaming?

Surely not.

No, I am too old for Mama to be calling for me to get out of bed for school.

She'd stopped doing that after…

Elementary? Was it elementary? Was it before her sickness or after?

Water weighs in, all around, and on the back of my eyelids burns the image of my childhood bedroom — yellow walls, daisy and bee printed curtains, a little wooden desk that I'd outgrown and always had to pull my knees up and hunch over, a chair of cherry wood.

And in the roar of the water, Mama's voice sounds through, clear, but soft. "Wenqing, be brave. If heaven has eyes—"

_We'll meet again in the next life. _

The world slams back into focus, and I sit up, gasping for air though I choke on it. Somewhere, an infant is _wailing. _

Pain races up my side with the motion, my vision swimming as though my head had expanded, ready to burst like the fireworks going off in my ears.

My hair flutters, on the edge of my vision.

The wrong color.

White.

And the ache of twenty years rushes back to me.

I'd spent ten years living in this world like a ghost, ten years old again, like I'd been once upon a time. Ten years old with black hair and two thick braids, a little red coat, and a bunny of white jade hanging about my neck.

Ten years old with short white hair, a metal hitai-ate, and no protective talismans anymore.

Twenty years between them, and the world blurring as though they were a haze, the first life more present than the second.

I am sitting on a dirt floor, a window directly across from me, the white light of morning a weak thing like a baby bird streaming in from it.

It is cold.

My boots are gone.

I leap to my feet despite the pain radiating from my sides, the way it makes the edges of the room spin out, almost off putting enough to make me collapse back down, but I force myself upright.

There's someone watching me from the doorway, a human figure that I can't make out the features of, but the posture reminds me of the way that men watch feral animals, as if frightened of the approaching predator and yet too frozen to do anything about it. As if deciding whether or not to put it down.

"Ni xing le?"

A woman's voice, loud to my ears.

Too loud. The room spins again.

_Ni xing le?_

你 醒 了?

醒 了?

_You awake le?_

_You're awake now? _

_Ni xing le? _

I almost turn to look at her, in the doorway, but I only manage a half turn, the lights too bright, the motion jolting my head as I fight with the urge to throw up. "Wo…"

My tongue trips. I'd never grown up speaking my mother tongue.

Mandarin is a foreign world to me. I, who had grown up speaking Cantonese, born to expat parents living in—

"Ah," the woman comes closer, speaking more haltingly now in the native tongue of Fire Country. "You speak, speak guoyu?"

_Ngo mm zi dou. I not know. _

Guoyu, such an old country word. The way Baba would say Mandarin.

I shake my head, though this only makes the aching worse. "I don't know what you're talking about."

What a fool I am to have believed Mama. There is a next life, but we are never fated to meet again.

* * *

The young couple who had dragged me out of their field and called the village doctor to look after my wounds are from Iron Country, immigrants who'd come to Fire because it has been too cold for oil flower production these past few years in the land where their ancestors had lived for centuries.

And yet once here, they'd suffered the age old story of immigrants everywhere — a child born to expat parents living in — couldn't connect to the culture, couldn't speak the language, couldn't imagine why they sold everything to buy land in this country that didn't want them.

I wish I could tell them the pain that comes from being born of two lands, that they probably shouldn't've come here if they wanted their child to have any sense of belonging, that this, this I have experience in, but I don't.

I don't have the words to communicate this to them, because the young woman, barely in her mid twenties — she'd told me her name was Tian Meijin — had smiled at me, petting my white hair, and told me that she is surprised to see hair of this color "here this country."

I don't know if it's because she thinks I am from Iron, but we communicate best through writing, so I've switched to sketching characters in the dust. Ten years of speaking no proper Cantonese has worn away even the trace semblance of good language or grammar, but I remember a little bit of how to speak, even though she'd shaken her head and told me through writing that "that's coastal talk, muimui."

Somehow, even though no language sits easily on my tongue anymore, and Mandarin doesn't even sound that much like Canto, I feel more comfortable here.

I miss it.

I miss the sea breeze and the Bay.

I miss the food and the electric lights and the garden.

And by the time I leave that little nondescript village, the burs of language I'd nearly forgotten clinging to my tongue, I feel the ache of both home and not home and all the things I'd wished to bury roar back to life in my chest.

There are some ghosts we can never fully kill, and where we come from is one of them.

Where do I come from?

Somewhere no one will ever believe.

Somewhere I will never go again.

* * *

I notice the crushed leaves as I come up the walk, the hint of boot marks on the leaves of my cucumber plants.

Closer inspection of the plants hanging off of the trellis reveals ripped tendrils and broken tips.

_Someone _had damaged them by being careless, either when picking the fruits or attempting to hang them on the trellis.

Standing there, in the garden, looking at the destruction, I feel my breathing shorten.

It hadn't even been half an hour since they fixed my concussion and my sides and forced me on leave for two weeks — and I already have started the grim realization that I have no desire to live at home for _two weeks _that somehow, like Dad, I've started feeling the burning in my feet, the all consuming desire to leave this house in the dust.

Out there at the ends of Fire Country, the stars above me do not judge.

It hasn't been even half an hour since I crossed the gates back into the city, and I am already burning with anger.

Couldn't've been the old lady next door, who only comes by to water and prune a little bit. She could help herself to the garden vegetables, given how negligent I've become about really _eating._

Only left someone who lived in this house full time, didn't it?

But then, it _could _also be someone else, completely unconnected to my family. I let the anger simmer, if only because I have no _proof. _Anger without any place to go turns within.

I clatter up the steps, pull open the screen door with a pop, and pull my boots off in the foyer.

"Tsuta?" Saku-nii pokes his head out of the kitchen. "Oh! You're home."

I straighten up, bare feet on the wooden floor. "Yeah," I agree, suddenly tired. "Last mission was a real mood killer."

How many had I killed while coming back?

The memories blur a bit. I'm not certain.

Not to mention, I'd made myself late _and _had to report bad news to the chunin at the gate, one of which had immediately scrammed across the rooftops to report intruders in Fire to the Hokage, and then I'd been dragged up to see the Hokage himself to deliver an oral report.

And then off I'd been shoved, down two flights of stairs and up three others to the concussion ward to get my head screwed back on right.

And then I'd come home and—

"Hey, Nii-san," I stand in the kitchen.

There's a plate of crushed cucumber on the table. Cucumber salad probably, he's added vinegar and salt.

"Were you in my garden?"

He turns to me, beaming. "Yeah, I trellised your cucumbers for you and picked the bigger ones."

The anger that'd been simmering in my bones bursts straight to the surface. "By killing them?"

Saku-nii blinks at me. "What?"

"It looks like a boar went through and stepped on everything." The words crack like a whip across his face, because I see the muted hurt run across it before he attempts to smooth it away.

It doesn't quite work.

"I was only trying to help."

And the ugly, angry part of me cannot be appeased with 'I was only trying to help' roars, its bloody maw open.

"Help?" There's an angry ringing in my ears. "Help? I don't need your help."

Would wonders never cease.

He bristles. "Well, they would've burned to death on the black plastic you put down after the last time you weeded the things."

"And you purposefully killing them all makes it any better?" I shake myself, too angry to stay. "Forget about it. I can't talk to you."

I slam the door behind me on my way out.

* * *

"It's been a while." Kobayashi-san nods to me when I come in. "The first time your brother came here, he didn't know what to do with himself."

He uses a bit of an odd word for 'your brother,' archaic almost. _Aniue. _

Not oniisan or niisan or anija or even aniki, but aniue. A foreign lilt to the way he pronounces it too, as if he's a little used to saying it some other way.

I notice it more, now that I've been out of the village more often.

He doesn't _talk _like a ninja of the general forces, or even one of Fire's many civilian farmers or traders.

For one, he talks like he has education, unlike most civilians I've had the chance to speak to. For another...the hint of an old accent.

But whatever his past is, it's no reason to pry.

He's never tried to ask why sometimes I hum tunes in a language that a child native to Fire has no business knowing either.

I sigh, running a hand through my newly shortened hair. "Saku-nii would." He's never, in the eleven years since I was born, been in charge of the grocery shopping. "Was he at least polite about it?"

Kobayashi-san shrugs. "Good enough. I overlooked it because he was your brother." He reaches behind the glass case and unhooks a pair of chickens. "You look beat, Hatake-chan."

I shrug back at him. "Newest mission kicked my ass all the way from Frost back here. I flop over the glass of his display case. "Why does the Fire-Frost border have to be so damned cold? It's already April."

He laughs, shaking a plastic bag open for the chickens, the two held firmly in one hand.

Despite my recent growth spurt, turning into a long and spindly beanpole, 5'4'' and counting, Kobayashi-san's got a fair few inches on me yet, and his stocky build and large hands make him seem taller still.

"Say, Hatake-chan," he says, "why don't you stick 'round? I was just about to cook."

And it isn't like there's anyone waiting for me at home anyway.

"I can help cook," I protest weakly, still leaning against the glass. It is cool to the touch, a comforting bite of freezer chill against the already rapidly warming April air.

He tsks at me. "Guests have no business cooking, Hatake-chan. All they're supposed to do is eat and be merry."

I make a face. "I don't know if I have it in me to be merry, Kobayashi-san."

He throws the bagged chickens back in the display case and closes the back. "Well, I'm merry enough for both of us, Hatake-chan. You're welcome in my backroom any time."

* * *

Kobayashi-san hums while he cooks, a pot something bubbling on the stove as he slices, knife blurring in his hands, as all I hear is the thunk thunk thunk of it hitting his wooden cutting board.

It's a comforting noise, given that it has no anger in it, unlike when Mom is in the kitchen.

It's got no annoyance, no sense of obligation, just the background sound of a baritone voice humming, and the light thunk of a knife hitting the cutting board.

"Oh, look how the lights of the town, the lights of the town are shining now." It sounds like a fiddle tune, the way he sings, upbeat and bouncy.

He starts fishing meat from the pot with a pair of chopsticks straight onto his massive cutting board, switching the now simmering pot to another burner, before flipping a pan onto the now recently vacated burner.

A liberal dose of oil later, he starts throwing newly chopped meat into the pain, the scent of it thick in the air, a sizzling heat rising.

With an apologetic glance at me, he laughs, a little upward nod as he does so. "Might get a little too spicy in here for your central Fire tastebuds, Hatake-chan."

I make another face at him. "I can handle pepper."

Or well, I _could. _Back then, when I'd been an undergraduate sitting down to dinner with a rowdy group of friends, the soups and stir fries had been red with it.

Baba had been a Hong Kong native, but Mama had come from Sichuan — the land of pepper, where once, a famous singer had a whole song comparing the girls there to the infamous Sichuan spice.

I hadn't been a Sichuan spice girl, but friends did tell me that I had a tongue tart as pepper and a fiery temper to match.

He shrugs, "if you say so," and tosses the pile of red pepper into the pan.

Instantly, the room is filled with heat, as if lit up with red.

The scene aches with memories that cling like ghosts. Without words to describe and without form, like the hollow echo of a bow hitting the cello strings.

A lifetime ago.

Half a minute into this, I'm hacking while crumpled over his table.

He doesn't comment upon it too much, just ruffles my hair with a hand that reeks of pepper and laughs a little when I start crying due to the spices and the heat, and offers a hand for my shoulder when I start crying in earnest, over the mission, over the concussion, over the loss of my mother tongue, and over the relationship I'd broken.

* * *

Shinku had ended up taking up a desk job at the Tower while his busted leg healed. I hadn't even realized there was something wrong with his leg, but then, we didn't really talk.

"The medics don't have time for shit like this, Hatake," Shinku mutters as he shoves another stack of paper towards me for me to sign. "These days, they got better things to worry about than some fucking genin's stress fracture."

He'd been sent off to run messages too, and I guess he'd pushed himself too hard.

For what reason, hard to say.

I don't mention that the medics had bothered with my concussion and battered sides, fixing me up pretty much as good as new even though the Tian couple had found me the best doctor they knew.

It'd been enough to get me back home to where I was going, and such kindness is few and far between.

In all the corners of the world I'd been to, in this life and the last, kindness is few and far between, from people not of blood especially.

"Yeah, yeah, you believe me now about the war?"

Two years in the field, and I think even Dan's grown a few sharp edges under his trembling.

Not that I talk much to Dan these days either. The boys bother me less now that I didn't see them every day, and I guess I bother them less, too.

"I believe you're some sort of seer," he grumbles, shifting his splinted right leg into a new, dubiously better position. "Did your old man tell you? There's lots of talk about him these days."

I roll my eyes.

"There's always talk about him."

And indeed, there always is.

Whispers and praise.

Glances and speculation.

For my dad is a man without origin.

He'd been adopted by Sarutobi Sasuke once upon a time, named a little brother.

But who he was before that?

No one who bothered to talk about it knows.

No one who whispered even knew his parents' names.

Hatake didn't have any meaning as a name until one lone man had stalled an invading _army _in the Badlands for days.

Sarutobi Sasuke's dead, and unlikely to spill any secrets from beyond his war hero grave.

And Dad's own lips are sealed with something stickier than gorilla glue.

* * *

A group of seven strides in, all tall and proud and fair, long red hair ranging from copper to auburn, the young man at their center wearing an elaborate pattern of braids, bloody red hair falling to his waist.

They walked with swagger and grace, and even though I haven't ever met an Uzumaki in my life, I could guess who they were and where they were from.

_Uzushio has yet to fall. _

I expect to feel more about this, but I don't.

Whatever led to their destruction, whatever ends up happening, I have no control over it.

Like I have no control over the coming war, the destruction of my family, or the death of my brother.

Only at the moment of crossroads could one hope to do anything.

And sitting here at age ten, filling out paperwork I have nothing to do with Uzushio.

_Ninja registration number. Date of birth. Rank. Mission type. Geographic location. On. Every. Damned. Page. _

Whatever else the late Nidaime had been, he was fucking thorough.

It's years before the destruction.

The seven pass us by, tall and proud, silver lapel pins and ink stained hands, red spirals on navy blue jackets.

Shinku glances at their back as they disappear off up the stairs, likely to the Hokage's own office, and mutters a "good riddance," as he does so.

"What?" I mutter as I scratch another vicious line of registration number, date of birth, rank, mission type, geographic location, on the fifteenth sheet of this particular set of forms. "The Uzumaki got you down?"

"Buncha stuck up bastards." The statement is filled with so much loathing that I almost blink in surprise. But no, onto the seventeenth sheet of these gods be damned forms. Shinku doesn't even have this much vitriol towards _me_, so whatever the Uzumaki have done must've been worse than the argument we had over the war. "Yapping about this, that, or the other house, as though I fucking give a shit about 'House of the King' or not."

Fair point, that sounded like it would push Shinku's triggers more than anything I could say to him. He _hates _anything that tries to pull arbitrary rank on him.

I imagine whatever monarchy the Uzumaki've got, it's completely arbitrary, at least from the outside. Which means that it blows Shinku's top off like nothing else.

"Anyway, our team got disbanded while you were gone."

A loaded bombshell.

I'm probably supposed to care more about it.

But I don't. "Sensei finally gave up on us?"

No skin off my nose. I've still got work either way, and it's not like Utatane Koharu taught any one of us anything.

Shinku snorts. "Something like that. No energy for us, now that war's coming."

I shrug. "Dan must've been distraught."

Shinku shifts his leg, wincing as he does so, and shoves another stack of paper into one of his millions of filing cabinets. "Cried about it for a week, but he found something in the hospital scrubbing bedpans."

"I don't envy him." That sounds fucking disgusting. Scrubbing urine and fecal matter out of pans while dodging whatever issues existed in the hospital doesn't sound like my idea of a fun time.

Shinku shrugs again. "Who the fuck knows what goes on between his ears?"

And I'd raise a glass to that.

Nothing else is heard except the scritch scritch of my pen pressing deep into the paper.

* * *

**A.N. **The vagaries of language, the desolation of being part of the diaspora, everything that happened in the last life is still, being _carried with _Tsutako as she attempts to make her way through this one. Because culture and all it entail is my passion.

Thank you so much everyone. Y'all make my day, and I've always been humbled by how much enthusiasm and support there is.

~Tav (Leaf)


End file.
